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FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 



FROM DUBLIN 
TO CHICAGO 

SOME NOTES ON A TOUR IN AMERICA 



BY 

GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM i_._^ 

AUTHOR OF "SPANISH GOLD," "GENERAL JOHN REGAN," "THE LOST TBIBEB,' 
"the bed HAND OF ULSTEH," ETC. 



1icvwvvouLv,^(VwvA^ CDwre-.. 



'^>^ 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



Copyright, 1914 

BY 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



Printed in 1914 



OCT 27 1914 p 

'CI,A38V216 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 



The Spirit of Adventure 



CHAPTER II 
Pressmen and Politicians 40 



CHAPTER III 
The "Hustling" Legend 66 



CHAPTER IV 
Holiday Fever 93 



CHAPTER V 
The Iron Trail , . 113 



CHAPTER VI 
Advance, Chicago! 132 



CHAPTER VII 
Memphis and the Negro 149 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Land of the Free 177 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 



PAQE 
WOMAK IN THE StATES 210 



CHAPTER X 
Mek and Husbands . ... 



CHAPTER XI 
The Open Door 247 



CHAPTER XII 
Colleges and Students 270 



CHAPTER XIII 
The Irishman Abroad 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 



FROM DUBLIN TO 
CHICAGO 

CHAPTER I 

THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

"From Dublin to Chicago." You can 
take the phrase as the epitome of a tragedy, 
the long, slow, century and a half old tragedy 
of the flight of the Irish people from their 
own country, the flight of the younger men 
and women of our race from the land of their 
birth to the "Oilcan Ur," the new island of 
promise and hope across the Atlantic. Much 
might be written very feelingly about that 
exodus. The first part of it began in reality 
long ago, in the middle of the 18th century, 
when the farmers of north-east Ulster were 
making their struggle for conditions of life 
which were economically possible. When the 
land war of those days was being waged and 

[9] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

the fighters on the one side were called 
"Hearts of Steel," that war which resulted in 
the establishment of the once famous Ulster 
Custom, hopeless men fled with their families 
from Belfast, from Derry, and from many- 
smaller northern ports. They settled in Amer- 
ica and avenged their wrongs in the course of 
the War of Independence. For the rest of 
Ireland the great exodus began later. Not 
until the middle of the 19th century when the 
famine of 1846 and the following years 
showed unmistakably that the social order of 
Connaught and Munster was impossible. It 
continued, that exodus, all through the years 
of the later land war. It is still going on, 
though the stream is feebler to-day. I could 
write a good deal about this exodus, could 
tell of forsaken cottages, of sorrowful de- 
partures, of broken hearts left behind. But 
it was not in the spirit of tragedy that we made 
our expedition to America, from Dublin to 
Chicago. 

The phrase has another connotation. It car- 
ries with it a sense of adventuring. It was 
[10] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

often, almost always, the bravest and most ad- 
venturous of our people who went. It was 
those who feared their fate too much who 
stayed at home. There is something fascinat- 
ing- in all the records of adventuring. We 
think of Vasco da Gama pushing his way 
along an unknown coast till he rounded the 
Cape of Good Hope. We think of Columbus 
sailing after the setting sun, and our hearts 
are lifted up. Less daring, but surely hardly 
less romantic, were the goings forth of our 
Irish boys and girls. They went to seek sus- 
tenance, fortune, life at its fullest and freest 
in an unknown land in unguessed ways. I 
like to think of the hope and courage of those 
who went. They had songs — in the earlier 
days of the adventuring — one seldom hears 
them now — which express the spirit of their 
going. I remember taking a long drive, 
twenty years ago, through a summer night 
with a young farmer who for the most part 
was tongue-tied and silent enough. But the 
twilight of that June evening moved him be- 

[11] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

yond his self-restraint and he sang to me with 
immense emotion: 

"To the West! to the West! To the Land 
of the Free!" I was vaguely uncomfortable 
then, not understanding what was in his heart. 
I know a little better now. He was a man with 
a home, settled and safe, with a moderate 
comfort secured to him, but the spirit of ad- 
venturing was in his blood, and America repre- 
sented to him in some vague way the Hy 
Brasil, the Isles of the Blest, which had long 
ago captivated the imagination of his ances- 
tors. 

Well, we went adventuring, too; but com- 
pared to theirs our adventure was very tame, 
very unworthy. Our ship was swift and safe, 
or nearly safe. It seemed hardly worth while 
to make our wills before we started. There 
were waiting for us on the other side friends 
who would guide our steps and guard us from 
— there were no dangers — all avoidable discom- 
fort. We even had a friend, such is our as- 
tounding good fortune, who offered to go with 
us and actually did meet us in New York. He 
[12] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

had spent much time in America and was well 
accustomed to the ways of that country. We 
were dining in his company, I remember, in 
the familiar comfort of a London club, when 
the news that we were really to go to America 
first came to us. 

"I'd better go, too," he said, "you'll want 
some one to take care of you. I don't think 
that either one or other of you is to be trusted 
to the American newspaper reporters without 
an experienced friend at your elbows." 

Next time we dined in our friend's company 
it was in the restaurant of the Ritz Carlton in 
New York, and very glad we were to see him, 
though the newspaper reporter in America is 
by no means the dangerous wild beast he is 
supposed to be. 

There was thus little enough of real adven- 
turing about our journey to America. Yet to 
us it was a strange and wonderful thing. We 
felt as Charles Kingsley did when he wrote 
"At Last," for a visit to America had long 
been a dream with us. There are other places 
in the world to which we wanted and still want 

[13] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

to go. Egypt is one of them, for we desire to 
see the deserts where St. Antony fasted and 
prayed. The South Pacific Archipelago is 
another, for we are lovers of Stevenson; but 
for me, at least, the United States came first. 
I wanted to see them more than I wanted to 
see the Nitrian Desert or Samoa. It was not 
Niagara that laid hold on my imagination, or 
the Mississippi, though I did want to see it 
because of "Huckleberry Finn." What I de- 
sired most was to meet American people in 
their own native land, to see for myself what 
they had made of their continent, to under- 
stand, if I could, how they felt and thought, to 
hear what they talked about, to experience their 
way of living. I wanted to see Irish friends 
whom I had known as boj^s and girls. I had 
been intimate with many of them before they 
went out. I had seen them, changed almost be- 
yond recognition, when they returned, on rare 
short visits to their homes. I wanted to know 
what they were doing out there, to see with my 
own eyes Avhat it was which made new men and 
women of them. I wanted to know why some 
[14] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

of them succeeded and grew rich, why others, 
not inferior according to our Irish judgment, 
came back beaten and disillusioned to settle 
down again into the old ways. Neither Egypt 
nor Samoa, not India, not Jerusalem itself, 
promised so much to me as America did. 

There is besides a certain practical advan- 
tage, in our particular case, which America has 
over any other country to which we could 
travel. The Americans speak English. This 
is a small matter, no doubt, to good linguists, 
but we are both of us singularly stupid about 
foreign tongues. My French, for instance, is 
despicable. It is good enough for use in Italy. 
It serves all practical purposes in Spain and 
Portugal, but it is a very poor means of con- 
veying my thoughts in France. For some 
reason the French people have great difficulty 
in understanding it, and their version of the 
language is almost incomprehensible to me, 
though I can carry on long conversations with 
people of any other nation when they speak 
French. It is the same with my Italian, my 
German and my Portuguese. They are none 

[15] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

of them much good to me in the countries to 
which they are supposed to belong. This is 
a severe handicap when travehng". We both 
hate the feehng that we are mere tourists. We 
do not Hke to be confined to hotels with poly- 
glot head waiters in them, or to be afraid to 
stir out of the channels buoyed out with Cook's 
interpreters. We see sights, indeed, visit pic- 
ture galleries, cathedrals, gape at mountains 
and waterfalls ; but we never penetrate into the 
inside of the life of these foreign countries. 
We are never able to philosophize pleasantly 
about the way in which people live in them. 
The best we can do is to wander after nightfall 
along the side streets of cities, or to rub shoul- 
ders with the shopping crowd during the after- 
noon in Naples or Lisbon. America is foreign 
enough. It is as foreign as any European 
country, as foreign as any country in the world 
in which people wear ordinary clothes. I dare 
say Algiers is more foreign. I am sure that 
Borneo must be. But New York is just as 
strange a place as Paris or Rome and therefore 
just as interesting, with this advantage for us 
[16] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

that we could understand, after a few days, 
every word that was spoken round us. 

Indeed this similarity of language was some- 
thing of a disappointment to us. We did not 
actually expect to hear people say "I guess" 
at the beginning of every sentence. We knew 
that was as impossible as the frequent "Be- 
gorras" with which we Irish are credited. But 
we had read several delightful American 
books, one called "Rules of the Game" with 
particular attention, and we thought the 
American language would be more vigorously 
picturesque than it turns out to be. The 
American in books uses phrases and employs 
metaphors which are a continual joy. His con- 
versation is a series of stimulating shocks. In 
real life he does not keep up to that level. 
He talks very much as an Englishman does. 
There are, indeed, ways of pronouncing cer- 
tain words which are strange and very pleasant. 
I would give a good deal to be able to say 
"very" and "America" as these words are said 
across the Atlantic. "Vurry" does not repre- 
sent the sound, nor does "Amurrica," but I 

[17] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

have tried in vain to pick up that vowel. I 
suppose I am tone deaf. I either caricature it 
as "vurry" or relapse into the lean English 
version of the word. There are also some 
familiar words which are used in ways strange 
to me. "Through," for instance, is a word 
which I am thoroughly accustomed to, and 
"cereal" is one which I often come across in 
books dealing with agriculture. But I was 
puzzled one morning when an attentive Amer- 
ican parlor maid, with her eye on my porridge 
plate, asked me whether I was "through with 
the cereal." Solicitors on this side of the At- 
lantic are regarded as more or less respectable 
members of society. Some of their clients may 
consider them crafty, but no one would class 
them, as actors used to be classed, with vaga- 
bonds. It was therefore a surprise to me to 
read a notice on an office door: "Solicitors 
and beggars are forbidden to enter this build- 
ing." I made enquiries ibout what the solici- 
tors had done to deserve this, and found that 
"solicitor," in that part of America, perhaps 
all over America, means, not a kind of lawyer, 
[18] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

but one who solicits subscriptions, either for 
some charity or for his own use and benefit. 

There are other words, "Baggage check," 
for instance, which could not be familiar to 
us, because we have not got the thing to which 
they belong in the British Isles. And a highly 
picturesque vigorous phrase meets one now 
and then. There was an occasion in which a 
laundry annoyed us very much. It did not 
bring back some clothes which had gone to be 
washed. We complained to a pleasant and 
highly vital young lady who controlled all the 
telephones in our hotel. She took our side in 
the dispute at once, seized the nearest receiver, 
and promised to "lay out that laundry right 
now." We went up to our rooms comforted 
with the vision of a whole staff of washer 
women lying in rows like corpses, with napkins 
tied under their chins, and white sheets over 
them. Americans ought not to swear, and do, 
in fact, swear much less than English people 
in ordinary conversation. The Englishman, 
when things go wrong with him, is almost 
forced to say "Damn" in order to express his 

[19] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

feelings. His way of speaking his native lan- 
guage offers him no alternative. The Amer- 
ican has at command a small battery of phrases 
far more helpful than any oath. It is no temp- 
tation to damn a laundry when you can "lay 
it out" by telephone. 

I like the American use of the word "right" 
in such phrases as "right here," "right now," 
and "right away." When you are told, by 
telephone, as you are told almost everything in 
America, that your luggage will be sent up to 
your room in the hotel "right now," you are 
conscious of the friendliness of intention in the 
hall porter, which the English phrase "at once" 
wholly fails to convey. Even if you have to 
wait several hours before you actually get the 
luggage you know that every effort is being 
made to meet your wishes. You may perhaps 
have got into a bath and find yourself, for the 
want of clean clothes, forced to decide between 
staying there, going straight to bed, and get- 
ting back into the dirty garments in which you 
have traveled. But you have no business to 
complain. The "right now" ought to comfort 
[20] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

you. Especially when it is repeated cheerily, 
while you stand dripping and embarrassed at 
the receiver to make a final appeal. The word 
"right" in these phrases does not intensify, it 
modifies, the immediateness of the now. This 
is one of the things to which you must get 
accustomed in America. But it is a friendly 
phrase, offering and inviting brotherliness of 
the most desirable kind. That it means no more 
than the "Anon, sir, anon," of Shakespeare's 
tapster is not the fault of anybody. Some 
sacrifices must be made for the sake of friend- 
liness. 

But taken as a whole the American language 
is very little different from English. I imag- 
ine the tendency to diverge has been checked 
by the growing frequency of intercourse be- 
tween the two countries. So many Americans 
come to England and so many English go to 
America that the languages are being reduced 
to one dead level. What used to be called 
"Americanisms" are current in conmion talk 
on this side of the Atlantic and on the other 
there is a regrettable tendency to drop even the 

[21] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

fine old forms which the Enghsh themselves 
lost long ago. "Gotten" still survives in 
America instead of the degraded "got," but I 
am afraid it is losing its hold. "Wheel" is in 
all ways preferable to bicycle, and may per- 
haps become naturalized here. I cannot imag- 
ine that the Americans will be so foolish as to 
give it up. Whether "an automobile ride" is 
preferable to "a drive in a motor" I do not 
know. They both strike me as vile phrases, 
and it is difficult to choose between them. 

America, as a country to travel in, had for 
us another attraction besides its language. 
Some people have relations in Spain to whom 
they can go and in whose houses they can stay 
as guests. Others have relatives of the same 
convenient kind in Austria and even in Russia. 
Many people have friends in France and Ger- 
many. We are not so fortunate. When we 
go to those countries we spend our time in 
hotels, or at best in pensions. We do not dis- 
cover intimate things about the people there. 
It is impossible for us to learn, except through 
books, and they seldom tell us the things we 
[22] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

want to know, whether the Austrians are mo- 
rose or cheerful at breakfast time, and whether 
the Germans when at home hate fresh air as 
bitterly as they hate it when traveling. And 
these are just the sort of things which it is 
most interesting to know about any people. 
The politics of a foreign country are more 
easily studied in the pages of periodicals like 
"The Nineteenth Century" than in the daily 
press of the country itself. Statistics about 
trade and population can be read up in books 
devoted to the purpose. All sorts of other in- 
formation are supplied by the invaluable Bae- 
deker, so that it is in no way necessary to go to 
Venice in order to find out things about St. 
Mark's. But very intimate details about the 
insides of houses, domestic manners and so 
forth can only be obtained by staying in pri- 
vate homes. This we thought we might accom- 
plish in America because we had some friends 
there before we started. In reality ready made 
friends are unnecessary for the traveler in 
America. He makes them as he goes along, 
for the Americans are an amazingly sociable 

[23] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

people and hospitable beyond all other nations. 
To us Irish — and we are supposed to be hospi- 
table — the stranger is a stranger until he is 
shown in some way to be a friend. In America 
he is regarded as a friend unless he makes 
himself objectionable, unless he makes him- 
self very objectionable indeed. We heard of 
American hospitality before we started. We 
feel now, as the Queen of Sheba felt after her 
visit to King Solomon, that the half was not 
told us. To be treated hospitably is always de- 
lightful. It is doubly so when the hospitality 
enables the fortunate guest to learn something 
of a kind of life which is not his own. 

For all these reasons — I have enumerated 
four, I think — we desired greatly to go to 
America; and there was still another thing 
which attracted us. You cannot go to America 
except by sea. Even if you are seasick — and I 
occasionally am, a little — traveling in a steam- 
er is greatly to be preferred to traveling in a 
train. A good steamer is clean. The best 
train covers you with smuts. The noise of the 
train is nerve-shattering. The noise which a 
[24] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

steamer makes, even in a gale, is soothing. 
When a train stops and when it starts again it 
jerks and bumps. It also runs over things 
called points and then it bumps more. A 
steamer stops far seldomer than a train, and 
does so very gently and smoothly. It never 
actually bumps, and though it very often rolls 
or pitches, it does these things in a dignified 
way with due deliberation. We chose a slow 
steamer for our voyage out and if we are for- 
tunate enough to go to America again we shall 
choose another slow steamer. 

Having made up our minds to go — or rather 
since these things are really decided for us and 
we are never the masters of our movements — 
having been shepherded by Destiny into a trip 
to America we naturally sought for informa- 
tion about that country. We got a great deal 
more than we actually sought. Everyone we 
met gave us advice and told us what to expect. 
Advice is always contradictory, and the only 
wise thing to do is to take none of what is 
offered. But it puzzled us to find that the ac- 
counts we got of the country were equally con- 

[2.5] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

tradictory. English people, using a curious 
phrase of which they seem to be very fond, 
prophesied for us "the time of our lives." They 
said that we should enjoy ourselves from the 
day we landed in New York until the day when 
we sank exhausted by too much joy, a day 
which some of them placed a fortnight off, 
some three weeks, all of them underestimating, 
as it turned out, our capacity for enduring de- 
light. Americans on the other hand decried the 
country, and told us that the lot of the traveler 
in it was very far from being pleasant. This 
puzzled us. A very modest and retiring people 
might be expected to underestimate the attrac- 
tions of their own land. We Irish, for in- 
stance, always assert that it rains three days out 
of every four in Ireland. But the Americans 
are not popularly supposed to be, and in fact 
are not, particularly modest. I can only sup- 
pose that the Americans we met before we 
started were in bad tempers because they were 
for one reason or another obliged to stay in 
England, and that they belittled their countrj^ 
[26] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

in the spirit of the fox who said the grapes 
were sour. 

One piece of advice which we got gave us, 
incidentally and accidentally, our first glimpse 
at one of the peculiarities of the American 
people, their hatred of letter writing as a means 
of communication. The advice was this: 

"Do not attemj^t to take a sealskin coat into 
America, because there is a law there against 
sealskin coats and the Custom House officers 
will hold up the garment." 

This seemed to us very improbable. I re- 
membered the song I have already quoted 
about the "Land of the Free" and could not 
bring myself to believe that a great nation, a 
nation that had fought an expensive war in 
order to set its slaves at liberty, could possibly 
want to interfere with the wearing apparel of 
a casual stranger. The Law, which is very 
great and majestic everywhere, is, according 
to the proverb, indifferent to very small mat- 
ters. America, which is as great and majestic 
as any law, could not possibly be supposed to 
concern itself with the material of a woman's 

[27] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

coat. So we reasoned. But the warning was 
given with authority by one who knew a lady 
who had tried to bring a sealskin coat into 
America and failed. We thought it well to 
make sure. An inquiry at the steamboat office 
was useless. The clerk there declined to say 
anything either good or bad about the Ameri- 
can Custom House regulations. I have no- 
ticed this same kind of cautious reticence 
among all Americans when the subject of cus- 
toms comes up. I imagine that the people of 
ancient Crete avoided speaking about that god 
of theirs who ate young girls, and for the same 
reason. There is no use running risks, and 
the American Custom House officer is a per- 
son whom it is not well to offend. This is the 
way with all democracies. In Russia and Ger- 
many a man has to be careful in speaking about 
the Czar or the Kaiser. In republics we shut 
our mouths when a minor official is mentioned, 
unless we are among tried and trusted friends. 
I myself dislike respecting any one ; but if re- 
spect is exacted of me I should rather yield it 
to a king with a proper crown on his head than 
[28] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

to an ordinary man done up with brass buttons. 
However, Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the 
Atlantic seem to like doing obeisance to offi- 
cials, and their tastes are no affairs of mine. 

Having failed in the steamboat office, I 
wrote a letter to a high American official in 
England — not the Ambassador. I did not 
like to trouble him about a sealskin coat. An 
English official, high, or of middling station, 
would have answered me by return of post, 
because he is glad of an opportunity of writing 
a letter. In fact, he likes writing letters so 
much that he would have sent me two answers, 
the first a brief but courteous acknowledgment 
of my letter and an assurance that it was re- 
ceiving attention; the second an extract from 
the Act of Parliament which dealt with my 
particular problem. The American official does 
not like writing letters. No American does. 
Rather than write a letter, an American will 
pursue you, viva voce, over hundreds of miles 
of telephone wire, or spend an hour of valuable 
time in having an interview with you in some 
more or less inaccessible place. Not even pro- 

[29] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

motion to a high official position will cause an 
American to feel kindly toward a pen. The 
official to whom I wrote would, I am sure, have 
told me all there is to know about the Ameri- 
can dislike of sealskin coats, if he could have 
got me on a telephone. He could not do that, 
because my name is not in the London tele- 
phone directory. He would, although he is a 
most important person and I am less than the 
least, have come to me and talked face to face 
if he had known where to find me ; but I wrote 
from a club, and the chances were five to one 
at least against his finding me there. There 
was nothing for it but to write a letter; but it 
took him several days to make up his mind to 
the effort. His answer, when he did write it, 
followed me to New York, and the sealskin 
coat problem had solved itself then. 

I noticed, when in New York, that it takes 
a posted letter much longer to get from one 
street in that city to another quite near at hand 
than it does in London for a letter posted in 
the same way to get from Denmark Hill to 
Hampstead. I connect this fact with the dis- 
[30] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

like of letter-writing which is prevalent among 
Americans. But I do not know which is cause 
and which is effect. It may be that the Amer- 
ican avoids letters because he knows that they 
will go to their destination very slowly. It 
may be, on the other hand, that the American 
post-office has dropped into leisurely ways be- 
cause it knows that it is seldom used for busi- 
ness purposes. Love letters it carries, no doubt, 
for it is difficult to express tender feelings on 
a telephone, and impossible to telegraph them ; 
but love letters are hardly ever urgent. The 
"Collins" or "Hospitable Roof" communica- 
tion must be a letter and must go through the 
post, but the writer and the recipient would 
both be better pleased if it never arrived at 
all. Business letters are different things, and 
I am sure the American post-office carries com- 
paratively few of them. 

I wish that some one with a taste for statis- 
tics would make out a table of the weights of 
the mail bags carried on Cunard steamers. I 
am convinced, and nothing but statistics will 
make me think differently, that the westward 

[31] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

bound ships carry far more letters than those 
which travel eastward. All Englishmen, ex- 
cept for obvious reasons English journalists, 
write letters whenever they have a decent ex- 
cuse. Americans only write letters when they 
must. It was, I think, the late Charles Stew- 
art Parnell who observed that most letters an- 
swered themselves if you leave them alone long 
enough. This is profoundly true, although 
Enghshmen do not believe it. I have tried 
and I know. Americans have either come 
across Parnell's remark or worked out the same 
truth for themselves. I applaud their wisdom, 
but I was once sorry that they practice this 
form of economy. If we had got an answer 
to our letter before we sailed, we should have 
left the coat behind us. As it was, we took 
the coat with us and carried it about America, 
giving ourselves indeed a good deal of trouble 
and reaping very little in the way of comfort 
or credit by having it. When we did get the 
letter it showed us that the Americans really 
do object strongly to these coats and have 
made a law against them. If we had known 
[32] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

that before starting, we should have left the 
coat behind us at any cost to our feelings. 

We are not aggressive people, either of us, 
and we always try to conform to the customs 
of the country in which we are, and to respect 
the feelings of the inhabitants. We cannot, 
indeed, afford to do anything else. Members 
of powerful, conquering nations go about the 
world insisting on having their own way wher- 
ever they are. The English, for instance, have 
spread the practice of drinking tea in the after- 
noon all over Europe. They make it under- 
stood that wherever they go afternoon tea must 
be obtainable. Other peoples shrug their shoul- 
ders and give in. The Americans have in- 
sisted that hotels shall be centrally heated and 
all rooms and passages kept up to a very high 
temperature. No one else wants this kind of 
heat, and until the Americans took to traveling 
in large numbers we were all content with fire- 
places in rooms and chilly corridors. But the 
Americans are a great people, and there is 
hardly a first-rate hotel left in Europe now 
which has not got a system of central heating 

[33] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

installed. The French have secured the use of 
their language, or a colorable imitation of their 
language, on all menu cards and bills of fare. 
No self-respecting maitre d'hotel, even if 90% 
of his patrons are Americans, English and 
Germans, would dare to call soup anything ex- 
cept potage or consomme. 1 think we owe it 
to the Russians that ladies can now smoke 
cigarettes without reproach in all European 
restaurants, though they cannot do this yet in 
America because very few Russians of the 
tourist classes go to America. It must be very 
gratifying to belong to one of these great na- 
tions and to be able to import a favorite cus- 
tom or a valued comfort wherever you go. 
We are mere Irish. We have never conquered 
any one ourselves, although we are rather good 
at winning other people's battles for them. 
We have not money enough to make it worth 
anybody's while to consider our tastes; nor, 
indeed, are we sure enough of ourselves to 
insist on having our own way. There is al- 
ways at the backs of our minds the paralyzing 
thought that perhaps the other people maj^ be 
[34] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

right and we may be wrong. We submit 
rather than struggle. 

We hke, for instance, good tea at break- 
fast, strong dark brown tea, which leaves a 
distinct stain on the inside of the cup out of 
which we drink it. Nobody else in the world 
likes this kind of tea. If we were a conquer- 
ing, domineering people, we should go about 
Europe and America saying: "This which we 
drink is tea. Your miserable concoction is slop 
or worse." If we were rich enough and if 
large numbers of us traveled, we should es- 
tablish our kind of tea as an institution. It 
would be obtainable everywhere. At first it 
would be called "The a VIrlandaise" and we 
should get it by asking for it. Afterwards 
it would be "the" simply, and if a traveler 
wanted anything else he would have to ask for 
that by some special name. But we are not 
that kind of people. There are not enough of 
us, and the few there are have not sufficient 
money to make them worth considering. Be- 
sides, we are never self-confident enough to as- 
sert that our kind of tea is the true and 

[35] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

superior kind. We are uneasily conscious that 
it is rude to describe other people's favorite 
beverages as "slop" even when they call ours 
"poison." And there is always the doubt 
whether we may not be wrong, after all. Great 
peoples do not suffer from this doubt. The 
American is perfectly certain that houses ought 
to be centrally heated. To him there does not 
seem to be any possibility of arguing about 
that. He has discovered a universal truth, 
and the rest of the world must learn it from 
him. 

The German is equally sure that fresh air in 
a railway carriage brings death to the person 
who breathes it. He is as certain about that 
as he is that water wets him when it is poured 
over him. There is no room for discussion. 
But we Irish are differently constituted. When 
any one tells us that our type of tea reduces 
those who drink it to the condition of nervous 
wrecks and ultimately drives them into lunatic 
asylums, we wonder whether perhaps he may 
not be right. It is true that we have drunk 
the stuff" for years and felt no bad effects ; but 
[36] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

there is always "the plaguy hundredth chance" 
that the bad effects may have been there all 
the time without our noticing them, and that, 
though we seem sane, we may be jibbering im- 
beciles. Thus it is that we never have the heart 
to make any real struggle for strong tea. 

This same infirmity would have prevented 
our dragging that coat into America if we 
had found out in time that sealskin coats strike 
Americans as wicked things. To us it seems 
plain that seals exist mainly for the purpose 
of supplying men, and especially women, with 
skins; just as fathers have their place among 
created things in order to supply money for 
the use of their children, or steam in order 
that it may make engines work. Left to our- 
selves, we should accept all these as final truths 
and live in the light of them. But the moment 
any one assails them with a flat contradiction 
we begin to doubt. The American says that 
the seal, at all events the seal that has the luck 
to live in Hudson Bay, ought not to be 
deprived of his skin, and that men and 
women must be content with their own skins, 

[37] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

supplemented when necessary by the fleeces of 
sheep. 

The Enghshman or the German would 
stand up to the American. 

"I will," one of them would say, "kill a Hud- 
son Bay seal if I like or have him killed for 
me by some one else. I will wear his skin 
unless you prevent me by actual force, and I 
will resist your force as long as I can." 

We do not adopt that attitude. We cannot, 
for the spirit of defiance is not in us. When 
we were assured, as we were in the end, that 
the American really has strong feelings about 
seals, we began to think that he might be right. 

"America," so we argued, "is a much larger 
country than Ireland. It is much richer. The 
buildings in its cities are far higher. Who are 
we that we should set up our opinions about 
tea or skins or anything else against the 
settled convictions of so great a people?" 

Therefore, though we brought our coat into 

America, we did so in no spirit of defiance. 

Once we found out the truth, we concealed the 

coat as much as possible, carrying it about 

[38] 



THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 

folded up so that only the lining showed. It 
was hardly ever worn, only twice, I think, the 
whole time we were there. The weather, in- 
deed, was as a rule particularly warm for that 
season of the year. 



[39] 



CHAPTER II 

PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

OuE ship, after a prosperous and pleasant 
voyage, steamed up the Hudson River in a 
bhnding downpour of rain which drove steadily 
across the decks. Our clothes had been packed 
up since very early in the morning, and we 
declined to get soaked to the skin when there 
was no chance of our being able to get dry 
again for several hours. Therefore, we missed 
seeing the Statue of Liberty and the Wool- 
worth Building. We were cowards, and we 
suffered for our cowardice by losing what 
little respect our American fellow travelers 
may have had for us. They went out in the 
rain to gaze at the Statue of Liberty and the 
Woolworth Building. We saw nothing 
through the cabin windows except an adver- 
tisement of Colgate's tooth paste. The Wool- 
worth Building we did indeed see later on. 
[40] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

The Statue of Liberty we never saw at all. I 
could of course write eloquently about it with- 
out having seen it. Many people do things of 
this kind, but I desire to be perfectly honest. 
I leave out the Statue of Liberty. I am per- 
fectly sure it is there; but beyond that fact I 
know nothing whatever about it. 

We actually landed, set foot at last on the 
soil of the new world, a little before 8 a.m., 
which is a detestable hour of the day under 
any circumstances, and particularly abomi- 
nable in a downpour of rain. If a stranger 
with whom I was very slightly acquainted 
were to land at that hour in Dublin, and if it 
were raining as hard there as it did that morn- 
ing in New York — it never does, but it is con- 
ceivable that it might — I should no more think 
of going to meet him at the quay than I should 
think of swimming out a mile or two to wave 
my hand at his ship as she passed. A year 
ago I should have made this confession with- 
out the smallest shame. It would not have 
occurred to me as possible that I should make 
such an expedition. If a very honored guest 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

arrived at a reasonable hour and at an acces- 
sible place — steamboat quays are never acces- 
sible anywhere in the world — if the day were 
fine and I had nothing particular to do, I 
might perhaps go to meet that guest, and I 
should expect him to be surprised and grati- 
fied. I now confess this with shame, and I 
intend to reform my habits. I blush hotly 
when I think of the feelings of Americans who 
come to visit us. They behave very much bet- 
ter than we do to strangers. There were three 
people to meet us that morning when we landed 
and two others arrived at the quay almost 
immediately afterwards. Of the five there 
was only one whom I had ever seen before, and 
him no oftener than twice. Yet they were 
there to shake our hands in warm welcome, to 
help us in every conceivable way, to whisper 
advice when advice seemed necessary. 

There were also newspaper reporters, inter- 
viewers, and we had our first experience of 
that business as the Americans do it, in the 
shed where our baggage was examined by Cus- 
tom House officers. 
[42] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

"Don't," said one of my friends, "say more 
than you can help about religion." 

The warning seemed to me unnecessary. I 
value my religion, not as much as I ought to, 
but highly. Still it is not a subject which I 
should voluntarily discuss at eight o'clock in 
the morning in a shed with rain splashing on 
the roof. The very last thing I should dream 
of offering a newspaper reporter is a formal 
proof of any of the articles of the Apostle's 
Creed. Nor would any interviewer whom I 
ever met care to listen to a sermon. I was 
on the point of resenting the advice; but I 
reflected in time that it was certainly meant for 
my good and that the ways of the American 
interviewer were strange to me. He might 
want to find out whether I could say my cate- 
chism. I thanked my friend and promised to 
mention religion as little as possible. I confess 
that the warning made me nervous. 

"What," I whispered, "are they likely to 
ask me?" 

"Well, what you think of America, for one 
thing. They always begin with that." 

[43] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

I had been told that before I left home. I 
had even been advised by an experienced trav- 
eler to jot do\\Ti, during the voyage out, all 
the things I thought about America, and have 
them ready on slips of paper to hand to the 
interviewers when I arrived. This plan, I was 
assured, would save me trouble and would give 
the Americans a high opinion of my business 
ability. I took the advice. I had quite a num- 
ber of excellent remarks about America ready 
in my pocket when I landed. They were no 
use to me. Not one single interviewer asked 
me that question. Not even the one who chat- 
ted with me in the evening of the day on which 
I left for home. I do not know why I was not 
asked this question. Every other stranger who 
goes to America is asked it, or at all events says 
he is asked it. Perhaps the Americans have 
ceased to care what any stranger thinks about 
them. Perhaps they were uninterested only 
in my opinion. I can understand that. 

Nor was I tempted or goaded to talk about 
religion. The warning which I got to avoid 
that subject was wasted. No one seemed to 
[44] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

care what I believed. I do not think I should 
have startled the very youngest interviewer if 
I had confided to him that I believed nothing 
at all. The nearest I ever got to religion in an 
interview was when I was asked what I thought 
about Ulster and Home Rule. That I was 
asked frequently, almost as frequently as I was 
asked what I thought of Synge's "Playboy of 
the Western World"; and both these seemed 
to me just the sort of questions I ought to be 
asked, if, indeed, I ought to be asked any 
questions at all. I do not, indeed cannot, think 
about Ulster and Home Rule. Nobody can. 
It is one of those things, like the fourth dimen- 
sion, which baffle human thought. Just as you 
hope that you have got it into a thinkable shape 
it eludes you and you see it sneering at your 
discomfiture from the far side of the last ditch. 
But it was quite right and proper to expect 
that an Irishman, especially an Irishman who 
came originally from Belfast, would have 
something to say about it, some thought to ex- 
press which would illuminate the morass of 
that controversy. I could not complain about 

[45] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

being asked that question. I ought to have 
had something to say about Synge's play, too, 
but I had not. I think it is a wonderful play, 
by far the greatest piece of dramatic liter- 
ature that Ireland has produced ; but I cannot 
give any reasons for the faith that is in me. 
Therefore, I am afraid I must have been a 
most unsatisfactory subject for the interview- 
ers. They cannot possibly have liked me. 

I, on the other hand, liked them very much 
indeed. I found them delightful to talk to, 
and look back on the hours I spent with them 
as some of the most interesting of my whole 
American trip. They all, without exception, 
seemed to want to be pleasant. They were the 
least conceited set of people I ever came across 
and generally apologized for coming to see 
me. The apologies were entirely unnecessary. 
Their visits were favors conferred on me. 
They were strictly honorable. When, as very 
often happened, I said something particularly 
foolish and became conscious of the fact, I 
used to ask the interviewer to whom I had said 
it not to put it in print. He always promised 
[46] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

to suppress it and he always kept his promise, 
though my silHnesses must often have offered 
attractive copy. Nor did any interviewer ever 
misrepresent me, except when he failed to un- 
derstand what I said, and that must always 
have been more my fault than his. At first I 
used to be very cautious with interviewers and 
made no statements of any kind without hedg- 
ing. I used to shy at topics which seemed dan- 
gerous, and trot away as quickly as I could to 
something which offered opportunity for 
platitudes. I gradually came to realize that 
this caution was unnecessary. I would talk 
confidently now to an American interviewer 
on any subject, even religion, for I know he 
would not print anything which I thought 
hkely to get me into trouble. 

I cannot understand how it is that Ameri- 
can interviewers have such a bad reputation 
on this side of the Atlantic. They are a highly 
intelligent, well-educated body of men and 
women engaged in the particularly difficult 
job of trying to get stupid people, like me, 
or conceited people to say something interest- 

[47] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

ing. They never made any attempt to pry 
into my private affairs. They never asked 
obviously silly questions. I have heard of 
people who resorted to desperate expedients 
to avoid interviewers in America. I should as 
soon think of trying to avoid a good play or 
any other agreeable form of entertainment. 
After all, there is no entertainment so pleas- 
ant as conversation with a clever man or 
woman. I have heard of people who were de- 
liberately rude to interviewers and gloried in 
their rudeness afterwards. That seems to me 
just as grave a breach of manners as to say 
insolent things to a host or hostess at a dinner 
party. 

Every now and then an interviewer, using a 
very slender foundation of fact, produces 
something which is brilliantly amusing. There 
was one, with whom I never came into per- 
sonal contact at all, who published a version 
of a conversation between Miss Maire O'Neill 
and me. What we actually said to each other 
was dull enough. The interviewer, by the 
simple expedient of making us talk after the 
[48] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

fashion which "Mr. Dooley" has made popu- 
lar, represented us as exceedingly interesting 
and amusing people. No one but a fool would 
resent being flattered after this fashion. 

The one thing which puzzles me about the 
business is why the public wants it done. It is 
pleasant enough for the hero of the occasion, 
and it is only affectation to call him a victim. 
The man w^ho does the work, the interviewer, 
is, I suppose, paid. He ought to be paid very 
highly. But where does the public come in? 
It reads the interview — we must, I think, take 
it for granted that somebody reads interviews, 
but it is very difficult to imagine why. The 
American public, judging from the number of 
interviews published, seems particularly fond 
of this kind of reading. Yet, however clever 
the interviewer, the thing must be dull in nine 
cases out of ten. 

^ly first interviewer, my very first, photo- 
graphed me. I told him that he was wasting 
a plate, but he went on and wasted three. Why 
did he do it? If I were a very beautiful 
woman I could understand it, though I think 

[49] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

it would be a mistake to photograph Venus 
herself on the gangway of a steamer at eight 
o'clock in the morning in a downpour of rain. 
If I had been a Christian missionary who had 
been tortured by Chinese, I could understand 
it. Tortures might have left surprising marks 
on my face or twisted my spine in an inter- 
esting way. If I had been an apostle of physi- 
cal culture, dressed in a pair of bathing draw- 
ers and part of a tiger skin, the photograph- 
ing would have been intelligible. But I am 
none of these things. What pleasure could the 
public be expected to find in the reproduction 
of a picture of a common place middle-aged 
man? , Yet the thing was done. I can only 
suppose that reading interviews and looking 
at the attendant photographs has become a 
habit with the American public, just as carry- 
ing a walking stick has with the English gen- 
tleman. A walking stick is no real use ex- 
cept to a lame man. The walker does not push 
himself along with it. He does not, when he 
sets out from home, expect to meet any one 
whom he wants to hit. It cannot be contended 
[50] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

that the stick is ornamental or adds in any- 
way to the beauty of his appearance. He car- 
ries it because he always does carry it and 
would feel strange if he did not. The Ameri- 
cans put up with interviews in their papers for 
the same sort of reason. After all, no one, 
least of all the subject, has any right to com- 
plain. 

Those were our two first imj^ressions of 
America, that it was a country of boundless 
hospitality and a country pervaded by agree- 
able newspaper men. I am told by those who 
make a study of such things that the first 
glance you get at a face tells you something 
true and reliable about the man or woman it 
belongs to, but that you get no further infor- 
mation by looking at the face day after day 
for months. When you come to know the man 
or woman really well, and have studied his 
actions and watched his private life closely for 
years, you find, if you still recollect what it 
was, that your first impression was right. I 
knew an Englishman once who lived for ten 
years in Ireland and was deeply interested in 

[51] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

our affairs. He told me that when he had 
been a week in the country he understood it, 
understood us and all belonging to us thor- 
oughly. At the end of three months he began 
to doubt whether he understood us quite as 
well as he thought. After five years he was 
sure he did not understand us at all. After 
ten years — he was a persevering man — he be- 
gan to understand us a little, and was inclined 
to think he was getting back to the exact po- 
sition he held at the end of the first week. Ten 
years hence, if he and I live so long, I intend 
to ask him again what he thinks about Ire- 
land. Then, I expect, he will tell me that he 
is quite convinced that his earliest impressions 
were correct. This is my justification for re- 
cording my first impressions of America. I 
hope to get to know the country much better as 
years go on. I shall probably pass through 
the stage of laughing at my earliest ideas, but 
in the end I confidently expect to get back to 
my joyous admiration for American hospital- 
ity and my warm aff-ection for American jour- 
nalists. 
[52] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

Almost immediately — certainly before the 
end of our second day — we arrived at the con- 
clusion that New York was a singularly clean 
city. We are, both of us, by inclination dwell- 
ers in country places. The noise of great towns 
worries us. The sense of being closely sur- 
rounded by large numbers of other people 
annoys us. But we should no doubt get used 
to these things if we were forced to dwell long 
in any city. I am, however, certain that I 
should always loathe the dirt of cities. The 
dirt of the country, good red mud, or the slime 
of wet stems of trees, does not trouble me, even 
if I am covered with it. I enjoy the dii-t of 
quiet harbors, fish scales, dabs of tar and rust 
off old anchor chains. I am happier when 
these things are clinging to me than when I am 
free of them. I am no fanatical worshipper 
of cleanliness. I do not rank it, as the Eng- 
lish proverb does, among the minor divinities 
of the world. But I do not like, I thoroughly 
detest, the dirt of cities, that impalpable grime 
which settles down visibly on face, hands, col- 
lar, cuiFs, and invisibly but sensibly on coats, 

[53] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

hats and trousers. New York, of all the cities 
I have ever been in, is freest of this grime. 
You can open your bedroom window at night 
in New York, and the pocket handkerchief you 
leave on your dressing table will still be white 
in the morning, fairly white. You can walk 
about New York all day and your nose will 
not be covered with smuts in the evening. I 
am told that the cleanness of New York is 
partly due to the fact that trains running in 
and out of the city are forced by the municipal 
authorities to use electricity as a motive power 
and are forbidden to burn coal till they get 
into the country. I am told that only a hard, 
comparatively smokeless coal may be burned by 
any one in the city. If these things are true, 
then the City Fathers of New York ought to 
be held up as a pattern to Town Councillors 
and corporations all over the world. 

As a matter of fact — such is the injustice of 
man — the municipal government of New York 
is not very greatly admired by the rest of the 
world. It is supposed to be singularly cor- 
rupt, and my fellow countrymen are blamed 
[54] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

for its corruptness. When an European city- 
feels in a Pharisaical mood it says; "Thank 
God I am not as other cities are, even as this 
New York." European cities may be morally 
cleaner. I do not know whether they are or 
not. They are certainly physically much dirt- 
ier. And from the point of view of the or- 
dinary citizen physical dirt is more continu- 
ously annoying than the moral kind. If I 
lived in a community whose rulers openly sold 
contracts and offices, I should break out into 
a violent rage once a year or so, and swear that 
I would no longer pay taxes for the benefit of 
minor politicians and their henchmen. All the 
rest of the year I should be placid enough, for 
I should forget the corruption if I escaped the 
perpetual unpleasantness of dirt, city dirt. No 
government, after all, is honest. The most 
that can be expected from men placed in au- 
thority is that they should not outrage public 
opinion by flaunting their dishonesty. But I 
cannot help feeling that men in authority, 
whom after all the rest of us pay, should do 
their business, and part of their business is to 

[55] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

keep smuts away from our faces. If it is 
really true that we Irish govern New York, 
then men ought to give up speaking of us as 
"the dirty Irish." Dirty! It appears that we 
are the only people who have ever kept a city 
clean. I wish we could do it at home. 

This Irish political corruption in New York 
is a very interesting thing, and I tried hard to 
arrive at some understanding of it. Tammany 
was defeated while we were in New York, and* 
Mr. Mitchel became Mayor, promising a clean, 
morally clean, administration. He also is of 
Irish descent, so that there were countrymen 
of ours on both sides in the struggle, and we 
are, evidently, not all of us lovers of corrup- 
tion. The scene in Broadway when the defeat 
of Tammany was announced surpassed any- 
thing I have ever beheld in the way of a demon- 
stration of popular rejoicing, except perhaps 
"Maf eking Night" in London. Huge crowds 
paraded the streets. Youths with horns 
marched in procession making music like that 
of Edouard Strauss, but even louder. Hawk- 
ers did an immense trade in small gongs with 
[56] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

balls attached to them which made a noise like 
cymbals. Grave-looking men wore on their 
heads huge plumes of cut, wrinkled paper, like 
the paper with which some people hide fire- 
places in summer time. Others had notices on 
their hats which declared "We told you so," 
notices printed beforehand and equally ap- 
plicable to a victory of the other side. Sky^ 
signs and lights of all sorts blazed above our 
heads. Newspaper offices flashed election fig- 
ures on screens in front of their windows. Now 
and then an explosion rose clear above the din, 
and we knew that some enterprising photog- 
rapher was making a flashlight picture of the 
scene. 

There was no question about the fact that 
New York was pleased with itself. The 
demonstration of popular delight would have 
followed very appropriately the capture of a 
Bastille, some stronghold of an ancient tyr- 
anny which held people down against their 
will. The supporters of Tammany Rule were, 
of course, not in Broadwaj^ that night. They 
may have been sitting at home behind drawn 

[57] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

blinds, meditating on the fickleness of men, or 
perhaps on the ingratitude of democracies. 
Tammany was corrupt, no doubt, but the water 
supply of New York is very good, and it was 
no easy matter to get water there. Also the 
city is strikingly clean. But there was no ques- 
tion about the general disgust with Tammany 
rule. No man whom I talked to before or 
after the election had a good word to say for 
the organization. Only, if I were suspected 
of glorying in their shame, patriotic Ameri- 
cans used occasionally to remind me of JNIar- 
coni scandals at home and the English sale of 
patents of nobility. And this was no real de- 
fense of Tammany. But I was not glorying, 
and Heaven forbid that I should ever hold up 
European political methods as a model to any 
one. All I wanted was to understand. I was 
eagerly curious to know how Tammany came 
to be, whence its power came. It did not sat- 
isfy me to be told that Tammany bribed people 
and sold offices, and therefore was powerful. 
That is like saying that Mohammed spread his 
religion by force of arms. I am sure that 
[58] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

Tammany did bribe, and I am sure that Mo- 
hammedans did ultimately conquer and put 
l^ressure on the conquered to accept the Koran. 
But before you can conquer you must have 
soldiers, soldiers who believe of their own free 
will. Before you can bribe you must have 
monej^ to bribe with. Before you can sell offi- 
ces you must have offices to sell. How did 
Tammany get itself into the position of being 
able to bribe? 

I was always asking these questions and al- 
ways failing to get satisfying answers to them. 
In the end, when I had almost given up hope, 
I did get a little light of the sort I wanted. 
It was after dinner one night at a private house 
in New York. The ladies had left the room, 
and there were five men sitting round the table. 
Four of them were clever and distinguished 
men, and they might have talked very satis- 
factorily about things which interested them. 
But with that thoughtful courtesy which is one 
of the charms of American hospitality, they 
allowed the fifth man, the stranger in their 
midst, to guide the conversation. I asked one 

[59] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

of my usual questions about Tammany. For 
a time I got nothing but the familiar stories of 
Tammany corruption given with more than the 
usual detail. We had names and dates put to 
scandalous achievements, and learned who had 
been allowed a "rake off" on this or that finan- 
cial transaction. I heard about the alliance, 
under the banner of Tammany, between the 
Irish and the Jews. I reflected that other 
things besides misfortune makes strange bed- 
fellows. Then came the illumination. One 
of the men present leaned back in his chair and 
laid down his cigar. 

"A Tammany ward boss," he said, "has the 
confidence of the people in his ward. If he 
had not he would not be a ward boss." 

I did not want to interrupt by asking ques- 
tions, and felt that I could guess sufficiently 
nearly the functions and business of a "ward 
boss" to do without an explanation. 

"He wouldn't," said my friend, "win or keep 

the confidence of the people unless he deserved 

it more or less, unless he deserved it a good 

deal, unless he really was a friend to the people. 

[60] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

He may not be a man of much ability. He 
generally isn't, but he has a good heart." 

This was startling. My preconceived idea 
of a Tammany boss of any kind was of a man 
of considerable ability and a bad heart. I sup- 
pose I looked surprised. The speaker quali- 
fied his statement a little. 

"A good heart, to start with. Every one in 
the ward who is in any kind of difficulty or 
trouble goes to the boss. Most of them are 
poor ignorant people and don't know how to 
manage things for themselves. There's a sick 
child who ought to be got into a hospital. The 
ward boss sees about it. There's a boy who 
ought to be in a situation. The ward boss gets 
a situation for him. There's a man who has 

been badly treated by his employer Oh! 

you know the sort of things which turn up. 
They're the same with poor people all the world 
over." 

I did know, very well. I was also beginning 
to understand. 

"Then I suppose," I said, "the people vote 
the way the ward boss tells them." 

[61] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

"NaturaUy." 

Well, yes, naturally. What do political 
rights and wrongs matter to them? 

"After a while," my informant went on, 
"if he manages well, he is let a little bit into 
the inner ring. He gets a bit of money 
dropped to him here and another bit there. 
That makes a difference to him. He begins to 
do himself pretty well, and he likes it." 

Most men do. These "bits of money," how- 
ever they come, bring very pleasant things 
with them. That is the same everywhere. 

"After a while — I don't say this is exactly 
what happens every time, but it's something 
like this. After a while he goes uptown and 
dines at one of the swagger restaurants, just 
to see what it's like. He is a bit out of it at 
first, but he goes again. He sees people there 
and he picks up their names. They are people 
with very impressive names, names he's been 
hearing all his life and associating with mil- 
lions and automobiles and diamonds. It gives 
him rather a pleasant feeling to find himself 
sitting at the next table and hearing the voices 
[62] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

of these men; seeing the women with their 
jewels, and smelling the scent off their clothes. 
You know the sort of thing." 

I could guess. I have, in my time, dined at 
restaurants of the kind, though not often 
enough to get to know the looks of their native 
millionaires. 

"Then some night or other one of these men 
steps across to our man's table and talks to 
him. He's as friendly as the devil. He intro- 
duces him to one or two others, and perhaps 
to some women; but women don't come much 
into business over here. Well, the poor fellow 
is a little bit above himself, and no wonder. 
He's never been anything before but just a 
'Mick,' and never expected to be anything 
else." 

Here I had to interrupt. 

"A Mick?" I said. 

"An Irishman. That's what we generally 
call Irishmen." 

They call us "Pat" on this side of the Atlan- 
tic, and I think I prefer it, but I have no par- 

[63] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

ticular quarrel with "Mick." Both names are 
conveniently short. 

"There's nothing more than friendliness at 
first. Then, perhaps a week later, there's some- 
thing said about a contract or a new loan that 
is to be floated. Influence, a word in the right 
quarter, comes in useful in these cases. Our 
man, the man we're talking of, doesn't know 
very clearly what the talk is about. He doesn't 
know that he has any influence; but it rather 
pleases him to feel that the other men think he 
has. There is a hint dropped about a sub- 
scription to the party funds and — well, that's 
how it's done." 

I grasped at ideas which flitted past me. 
There always are "party funds." Politics 
cannot go on without them. There always are 
desirable things, whether contracts, rakes ofl*, 
appointments, or — as in our monarch-ridden 
states — ^titles. But I wonder where the blame 
for the corruption really lies, the heavy part of 
the blame. Tammany Mick had a good heart 
to start with and he was not a man of much 
ability. 
[64] 



PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 

However, these are only the speculations of 
an inquisitive man. They do not matter. New 
York smashed Tammany last autumn and per- 
haps will keep it smashed. But a mere alliance 
of anti-Tammany forces will not permanently 
get the better of a well-constructed machine, 
nor is enthusiasm for clean government good 
in a long-distance race. An American poet 
has noted as one of the characteristics of truth 
that, though slain, it will rise again, and of 
error that when vanquished it dies among its 
worshippers. In politics it is the machine which 
possesses truth's valuable powers of recupera- 
tion, and idealism which gets counted out after 
a knockdown blow. It seems as if a machine 
will only go under finally in competition with 
another more efficient machine, and the new, 
more efficient machine is just as great a danger 
to poHtical morality as the old one was. This 
is the vicious circle in which democracies go 
round and round. Perhaps the truth is that 
politics, like art, are non-moral in nature, that 
politicians have nothing to do with right or 
wrong, honesty or dishonesty. 

[65] 



CHAPTER III 

THE '^hustling'' LEGEND 

I WALKED through New York late at night, 
shortly after I landed, and had for compan- 
ions an Englishman who knew the city well 
and an American. The roar of the traffic had 
ceased. The streets were almost deserted. 
Along Fifth Avenue a few motors rushed 
swiftly, bearing belated revelers to their homes. 
Save for them, the city was as nearly silent as 
any city ever is. We talked. It was the Eng- 
lishman who spoke first. 

"New York and the sound of blasting go 
together," he said. "They are inseparably con- 
nected in my mind. New York is built on 
rock out of material blasted off rock with dy- 
namite. This fact explains New York. It is 
the characteristic thing about New York. No 
other city owes its existence in the same way 
to the force of explosives shattering rock." 
[66] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

"New York," said the American, "is one 
of the soldiers of Attila the Hun." 

The night was warm. He unbuttoned his 
overcoat as he spoke and flung it back from 
his chest. He squared his shoulders, looked 
up at the immensely lofty buildings on each 
side of us, looked round at the shadow-patched 
pavements, fixed his eyes finally on the lamps 
of a motor which was racing toward us from 
a great distance along the endless avenue. 
Then he pursued his comparison. 

"Attila's soldier," he said, "went through 
some Roman city with his club over his shoul- 
der. There were round him evidences of old 
civilizations which puzzled him. He gazed at 
the temples, the baths, the theaters with won- 
dering curiosity; but he was conscious that he 
could smash everything and kill every one he 
saw. He was the barbarian, but he was also 
the strong man. New York is like that among 
the cities of the world." 

I contributed a borrowed comment on 
America. 

"An Irishman once told me," I said, "that 

[67] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

America isn't a country. It's a great space in 
which there are the makings of a country lying 
about. He might have said the same sort of 
thing about New York. There are the mak- 
ings of a city scattered round." 

''Chunks of blasted rock," said the Eng- 
lishman. 

"The Hun had a lot to learn," said the 
American, "but he was the strong man. He 
could smash and crush. Nobody else could." 

There is a very interesting story or sketch — 
I do not know how it ought to be described — 
by the late "O. Henry"— which he called "The 
Voice of the City." He imagines that certain 
American cities speak and each of them utters 
its characteristic word. Chicago says, "I will." 
Philadelphia says, "I ought." New Orleans 
says, "I used to." If I had "O. Henry's" 
genius I should try to concentrate into phrases 
the voices of the cities I know. I should like 
to be able to hear distinctly what they all say 
about themselves. Belfast, I am convinced, 
says, "I won't." Dublin occasionally mur- 
murs, "It doesn't really matter." So far I 
[68] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

seem to get, but there I am puzzled. I should 
like to hear what Edinburgh says, what Paris 
says, what Rome would say if something 
waked her out of her dream. I should be 
beaten by London, even if I had all his genius, 
just as "O. Henry" was beaten by New York. 
He failed to disentangle the motif from the 
clamorous tumult of mighty chorus with which 
that city assails the ear. There is a supreme 
moment which comes in the Waldstein Son- 
ata. The listener is a-quiver with maddening 
expectation. He is wrought upon with sound 
until he feels that he must tear some soft thing 
with his teeth. Then, at the moment when the 
passion in him becomes intolerable, the great 
scrap of melody thunders triumphantly over 
the confusion and it is possible to breathe 
again. This is just what does not happen in the 
case of places like London and New York. A 
Beethoven yet unborn will catch their melodies 
for us some day and the sonata of great cities 
will be written. Till he comes it is better to 
leave the thing alone. Neither blasting nor 
dynamite is the keyword. Attila's Hun with 

[69] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

his club fails us, though he helps a little. And 
there is more, a great deal more, about New 
York than the confused massing of materials 
on the site of what is to be a temple or a rail- 
way station. 

When I was in New York they were build- 
ing a large edifice of some kind in Broadway, 
not far from Thirty-fifth Street. I used to 
see the work in progress every day, and often 
stopped to watch the builders for a while. 
Whenever I think of New York I shall re- 
member the shrill scream of the air drill 
which made holes in the steel girders. The 
essential thing about that noise was its sugges- 
tion of relentlessness. Perhaps New York is 
of all cities the most relentless. The steel suf- 
fers and shrieks through a long chromatic 
scale of agony. New York drills a hole, pauses 
to readjust its terrible force, and then drills 
again. 

That is one aspect of New York. The 
stranger cannot fail to be conscious of it. It 
is brought home to him by the rush of the over- 
head railway in Sixth Avenue, by the hurry 
[70] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

of the crowds in Broadway, by the grinding 
clamor of the subway trains. It is this, no 
doubt, which has given rise to the theory that 
New York is a city of hustle. It seems to me 
a very cruel thing to say of any people that 
they hustle. The word suggests a disagree- 
able kind of spurious activity. The hustler is 
not likely to be efficient. He makes a fine show 
of doing things ; but he does not, somehow, get 
much done. The hustler is like a football 
player who is in all parts of the field at differ- 
ent times, sometimes in the forward line, some- 
times among the backs, always breathless, gen- 
erally veiy much in the way, and contributing 
less than any one else to the winning of the 
game for his side. If New York were a city 
of hustlers. New York would drill no holes in 
steel girders. 

The fact is that America has, in this matter 
of hustle, been grossly slandered in Europe. 
I am not sure that the Americans, with a curi- 
ous perversity, have not slandered themselves, 
and done as much as any one to keep the hustle 
myth alive. The American understands the 

[71] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

value of not hurrying as well as any one in the 
world. He has, justly, a high opinion of him- 
self and declines to be a slave to a wretched 
machine like a clock. I realized this leisure- 
liness the first time I went into a restaurant to 
get something to eat. I could have smoked a 
cigarette comfortably between the ordering 
and the getting of what I ordered. I could 
have smoked other cigarettes, calmly, as cigar- 
ettes ought to be smoked, between each course. 
American men do actually smoke in this way 
during meals, and I trace the custom not to an 
excessive fondness for tobacco but to the lei- 
surely way in which the business of eating 
is gone about. And it is not in restaurants 
only that this quiet disregard of time's abom- 
inable habit of going on is evident. The New 
York business man gets through his work — 
it is evident that he does get through it — with- 
out feeling it necessary to give every one the 
impression that each half hour of the day is 
dedicated to a separate affair and that the 
entire time-table will be reduced to chaos if 
[72] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

a single minute strays out of its proper com- 
partment into the next. 

Perhaps it is because I am Irish that I Hke 
this way of doing business. There is a char- 
acter in one of the late Canon Sheehan's novels 
who says that there are two things which are 
plenty in Ireland — water and time. There are 
undoubtedly places in the world where water 
is scarce, the Sahara desert for instance; but I 
suspect that time is quite abundant everywhere 
though some people affect to believe that it is 
not. I know English business men who scowl 
at you if you venture, having settled the little 
affair which brought you to their office, to 
make a pleasant remark about the chances of 
a general election before Christmas. They 
pretend that they have not time to talk about 
General Elections. They do this, as Bob Saw- 
yer used to have himself summoned from 
church, in order to keep up their reputation. 
They want you to think that they are over- 
whelmed with pressing things. I have always 
suspected that, having got rid of their visitor, 
they spend hours reading about General Elec- 

[73] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

tions in the daily papers. The American busi- 
ness man is, apparently, never too busy to en- 
joy a chat. He invites you to lunch with him 
when you go to his office. He shows you the 
points of interest in the neighborhood after 
luncheon. He discusses the present condition 
of Ireland, a subject which demands an im- 
mense quantity of time. He settles the little 
matter which brought you to his office with 
three sentences and a wave of the hand. He 
does not write you a letter afterwards begin- 
ning : "In confirmation of our conversation to- 
day I note that you are prepared to " It 

is, I suppose, a man's temperament which 
settles which way of doing business he prefers. 
It is also very largely a question of temper. 
In my normal mood I prefer the American 
method. There is a broad humanity about it 
which appeals to me strongly. But if I have 
been annoyed by anything early in the day, 
broken a bootlace, for instance, or lost a collar 
stud, I would rather do business in the Eng- 
lish way. In the one case I like to come in 
contact with a fellow man, to feel that he has 
[74] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

affections and weaknesses like my own. It is 
pleasant to get to know him personally. In 
the other case, thanks to the misfortunes of 
the morning, I am filled with a gloomy hatred 
of my kind. I want, until the mood has worn 
off, to see as little as possible of any one and 
to keep inevitable people at arm's length. It 
is much easier to do this when the inevitable 
people also want to keep me at arm's length, 
and the English business man generally does. 
The friendliness of the American business man 
is a little trying sometimes to any one in a 
bad temper. Sometimes, not always. I re- 
member one occasion on which I was excep- 
tionally cross. I forget what had happened 
to me in the morning, but it was worse than 
breaking a bootlace. It may have had some- 
thing to do with telephones, instruments which 
generally drive me to fury. At all events, 
though in a bad temper, I had to go to see a 
man in his office. He was a man of extraor- 
dinarily friendly spirit, even for an American. 
I dreaded my interview, fearing that I might 
say something actually rude before it was over. 

[75] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

Nothing could have been more soothing than 
my reception. This wonderful man cast a 
single quick glance at me as I entered his of- 
fice. He realized my condition and got 
through with the wretched necessity which had 
brought me there with a rapidity and precision 
which would have done credit to any English- 
man. Then he ushered me out again without 
making or giving me time to make a single 
remark of a miscellaneous kind. I apologized 
to him afterwards. He patted me reassuringly 
on the shoulder. 

"That's all right," he said. "I saw the 
minute you came into the room that you were 
a bit rattled." 

That seems to me a splendid example of 
tact. I do not suggest that all American busi- 
ness men have this faculty for swift, self-sac- 
rificing sympathy. It must be rare, even in 
New York. Does it exist at all in England? 
If I called on an English merchant some 
morning when the spring was in my blood and 
I felt that I wanted to leap and spring like a 
Iamb, would he divine my mood, join hands 
[76] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

and dance with me on his hearth rug? I doubt 
it. He would not do it even if I were a hun- 
dred times more important than I am. He 
would not do it if I were chairman of a fan- 
tastically prosj)erous company. Yet it must 
have been just as hard for my American friend 
to be austere as it would be for an Englishman 
to be inanely gay. 

I am not a business man myself. I have 
for many years practiced the art of getting 
other people to manage my small affairs for 
me, so perhaps I ought not to write about busi- 
ness men. But an author is always on the 
horns of a dilemma. He knows he ought not 
to write about anything that he does not thor- 
oughly understand. But if he confined him- 
self to those subjects, he would never write 
anything at all. Even if he gave himself some 
latitude and allowed himself to write about 
things of which he knows a little, he would 
still find himself in a narrow place. His best 
hope is that if he writes freely on every sub- 
ject that comes into his head he will only be 
found out by a few people at a time. Sailors 

[77] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

will find him out when he writes about the sea. 
Insurance agents will laugh at his ignorance 
when he writes about premiums; doctors will 
be irritated when he sets down what he thinks 
about measles. But the sailors will believe that 
he knows a great deal about insurance and dis- 
ease in general; doctors will think him an ex- 
pert about ships, and so forth. And there are 
always far fewer people in any given profes- 
sion than there are people out of it. The 
writer has therefore a good hope that those 
who find him out in any point in which he 
touches will always be a minority. Minorities 
do not matter. 

It is the consideration of this fact which 
gives me courage to write about business men, 
and more courage now to go on and write about 
buildings. I know nothing about architec- 
ture, but the people who do are very few, so 
that the penalty of being found out will be 
light. 

There does not seem at first glance to be any 
connection between business men and archi- 
tecture. But there is a very real one. There 
[78] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

is also a private connection of thought in my 
own mind. It was from the windows of an 
office, high up in one of the skyscraper build- 
ings, that I got my first comprehensive view of 
New York. There is, generally, a certain 
sameness about these bird's-eye views of cities. 
The bird, and the man who gets into the posi- 
tion of the bird, sees a number of spires of 
churches sticking up into the sky and below 
them a huddled mass of roofs. Sometimes tall 
chimneys assert themselves beside the spires. 
But the spires are the dominating things. The 
chimneys may have every appearance of arro- 
gance, but one feels that they are upstarts. 
The spires hold the place of a recognized aris- 
tocracy. The bird, if he w^ere say an eagle, 
and had not the sparrow's intimate knowledge 
of the life of the streets, would naturally come 
to the conclusion that the worship of God is 
the most potent factor in the life of the Euro- 
pean city. He would, perhaps, be wrong, but 
he would have a good case to make for him- 
self when he was recounting his experiences 
to the other eagles. 

[79] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

"I have seen," he would say, "these vast nest- 
ing places of men, and the spires of the 
churches are far the most important things in 
them. They reach up higher than anything 
else, and there are great numbers of them." 

But the eagle would not say that about New 
York. It is not spires, nor is it factory chim- 
neys which stick up highest there and catch 
the attention of a spectator from a height. 
Office buildings are the dominant things. 
Churches are kept in what many people re- 
gard as their proper place. You can see them 
if you look for them, but they are subordi- 
nate. The same thing is true of another view 
of New York, that marvelous spectacle of the 
city's profile which you get in the evening from 
any of the Hudson River ferry boats. The 
sky line is jagged and the silhouettes are not 
those of cross-crowned domes or spires, but of 
large buildings dedicated to commerce. 

The philosophic eagle might, reasoning as 

he did before, leap to the conclusion that God 

is of Httle importance in the city of New York; 

that bank books there count for more than 

[80] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

Bibles. I am not at all sure that he would be 
right. It looks, any one who has seen New 
York must admit it, as if the American who 
coined the phrase, "the almighty dollar," had 
really expressed the faith of his countrymen. 
But I am inclined to think that he was led into 
injustice by a desire to be epigrammatic. It 
may be that my experience was singularly for- 
tunate, but I came to the conclusion that God 
counts for a good deal in the life of New York 
and of America generally. I do not mean that 
any creed has obtained for itself national 
recognition, or that any particular church has 
reached a position analogous to that of the 
English established church. Religion in 
America seems to me a confused force, which 
has not yet fully found itself; but it is a force. 
The desire to do justly, to love mercy, though 
scarcely perhaps to walk humbly, is present 
and is coming to be mightier than the dollar. 
Yet it is certainly true that the most strik- 
ing buildings in New York are not ecclesias- 
tical, but commercial. This is a defiance of 
the old European tradition, a breach even of 

[81] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

that feebler tradition which America took over 
from Europe before she entered into posses- 
sion of her own soul. I am reminded of At- 
tila's Hun with his contempt for Koman civili- 
zation and his confidence in his own strength. 
Business used to look askance at magnifi- 
cence. It was the pride of the London mer- 
chant that he managed mighty affairs in an 
unpretentious counting house. But we are 
learning from the Americans. Our insurance 
companies were the first to start building 
sumptuous habitations for themselves. Banks 
and other corporations are following their ex- 
ample. Yet even to-day the offices in the city 
of London are singularly unimpressive to the 
eye, and many a house with world-wide influ- 
ence scorns to appeal to the passerby with 
anything more striking than a "Push" or 
"Pull" stamped in worn letters on the brass 
plates of a pair of swinging doors. It was a 
great tradition, this total lack of ostentation 
where mighty forces were. At first New York 
too felt the attraction of it. Wall Street, 
which is one of the older parts of the city, is 
[82] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

not impressive to look at. The Cotton Ex- 
change is a building of a very middling kind. 
Yet I am inclined to think that the instinct for 
magnificence displayed by the newer Ameri- 
can captains of commerce is sound. I am not 
considering the advertisement value of a great 
building. It may be worth something in that 
way, though grubbiness can also be an effec- 
tive advertisement. What seems to lie at the 
back of the display is the desire of life to ex- 
press itself in sumptuousness. The Venetians, 
a nation of merchants, felt this and built in 
the spirit of it. After all, commerce is a very 
great kind of life. There is energy in it, ad- 
venture, romance. It offers opportunities for 
struggle, promises victory, threatens defeat. 
Is it any wonder that men absorbed in it should 
feel the thrill of the ''superhia vitce" and build 
to secure visible embodiment for the emotion? 
]Men have always tried to build finely for their 
governors. Kings' palaces and parliament 
houses are impressive everywhere. This was 
right when kings and parliaments were im- 
portant. Now that the offices of financiers 

[83] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

are much more important than the habitations 
of law makers, they too are becoming splendid. 
It is, I suppose, to be expected that these 
mighty buildings should have forms which at 
first are repellent in their strangeness. We, 
who were nursed in an older artistic tradition, 
have learned to value, perhaps too highly, re- 
straint and dignity. The outstanding char- 
acteristics of the American skyscraper seem 
to me to be exuberance. I am reminded of the 
wild spirit of one or two European buildings, 
of the cloisters of Belem, for instance, though 
there the sense of exultation expresses itself 
in a very different way. But the essential 
spirit is similar. I could imagine the builders 
chanting as they worked: "Behold ye are gods. 
Ye are all children of the Highest." They 
are gods who have not experienced the tedium 
vitce of Olympian happiness. But New York 
is not so drunken with exuberance that it can 
not build with quiet dignity. Tiffany's shop 
in Fifth Avenue, and, a little lower down, Alt- 
man's great department store, are buildings 
on which the eye rests with undisturbed satis- 
[84] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

faction. The men who built these had more in 
mind than the erection of houses in which rings 
or stockings might conveniently be sold. They 
felt that commerce in jewelry or clothes was 
in itself a worthy thing which might be under- 
taken in a lofty spirit, and greatly carried on. 
There is a feeling of nobility in the propor- 
tion of windows and doors, in the severity of 
the street fronts. These might be palaces of 
noblemen of an ancient lineage. They are — 
shops. Has America discovered a dignity in 
shop-keeping? The station of the Pennsyl- 
vania Railway is one of the glories of New 
York, and here again New York is certainly 
right, though I — it is a purely personal feel- 
ing — am infuriated to find the calm self-re- 
straint of the Greeks associated with anything 
so blatant as a railway train. Anywhere else 
in the world the great hall of the Central 
Station would be the nave of a Cathedral. It 
is impossible not to feel — even when hurrying 
for a train — that the porters are really acolytes 
masquerading for a moment in honor of some 
fantastic fool's day. 

[85] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

The churches of New York are of subor- 
dinate interest. Trinity Church has a singu- 
larly suggestive position, right opposite the 
end of Wall Street, God in protest against 
Mammon. But the building itself might be 
anywhere in England. I can fancy it in Not- 
tingham or Bath, and there would be no need 
to alter the place of a stone in it. It is a dig- 
nified and beautiful parish church, but it has, 
as a building, nothing American about it. It 
has not, apparently, influenced the spirit of 
New York architecture. The people have not 
found self-expression in it. St. Patrick's 
Cathedral, in Fifth Avenue, is a fine, a very 
fine example of modern Gothic. Except the 
new Graduate College buildings at Princeton, 
this cathedral strikes me as the finest example 
of modern Gothic I have ever seen. But ought 
New York to have Gothic buildings? Here, 
I know, I come up against the difficult ques- 
tion. There are those who hold that for certain 
purposes — for worship and for the dignified 
ceremonial life of a university — the Gothic 
building is the one perfect form which man 
[86] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

has devised. We cannot better it. All we can 
do is soak ourselves in the spirit of the men of 
the great centuries of this style and humbly 
try to feel as they felt so that we may build 
as they. It may be granted that we shall de- 
vise nothing better. I, for one, gladly admit 
that St. Patrick's in New York and the Hall 
at Princeton are conceived in the old spirit and 
are as perfect as any modern work of the kind 
is, perhaps as perfect as any modern Gothic 
work can be. But when all this is said it re- 
mains true that the life of New York is not 
the life of mediaeval Rouen, of the London 
which built Westminster or of the Cologne 
which paid honor to the Three Kings. Can 
New York accept as its vision of the divine 
the conception, however splendid, of those 
"dear dead days"? 

It may well be that I am all wrong in my 
feeling about modern Gothic, that what is 
wanting in these buildings is not the spirit 
which was in the old ones. It may be that, like 
certain finer kinds of wine, they require ma- 
turing. I can conceive that a church which 

[87] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

seems remote now, almost to the point of frig- 
idity, may not only seem, but actually be, dif- 
ferent two hundred years hence. It is scarcely 
possible to think that the prayers of genera- 
tions have no effect upon the walls of the 
building in which they are uttered. There 
must cling to the place some aroma, some 
subtle essence of the reachings after God of 
generation after generation. The repentances 
of broken hearts, the supplications of sorrow- 
ing women, the vows of strong, hopeful souls, 
the pieties of meek priests, must be present 
still among the arches and the dim places above 
them. Men consecrate their temples, but it 
takes them centuries to do it. Perhaps West- 
minster would have left me cold if I had 
walked its aisles four hundred years ago. This 
lack of maturity and not, as I suppose, the 
fact that they do not come of the spirit of our 
time, may be what is the matter with our newer 
Gothic buildings. 

There is one church in New York — there 
may be others unknown to me — which gives the 
impression of having grown out of the life 
[88] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

which dwelt in it, in the same sense in which 
certain English churches, those especially of 
the Sussex country side, have grown rather 
than been deliberately and consciously built. 
This is the unpretentious building known as 
"The Little Church Round the Corner." The 
affectionate familiarity of the name suits the 
place and means more to the discerning soul 
than any dedication could mean. The student 
of architecture would perhaps reckon this 
church contemptible, and having seen it once 
would bestow no second glance upon it. It is 
built in no style of recognized orthodoxy. I 
do not know its history, but it looks as if bits 
had been added on to it time after time by 
people who knew nothing and cared nothing 
for unity of design, but who had in their hearts 
a genuine love for the building. It is an ex- 
pression of life, this little church, but not, I 
think, of the life of New York. It is as if 
someone had made a little garden and filled it 
wdth all kinds of delicate sweet-smelling flow- 
ers in a glade of a mighty forest. Within the 
garden are the flowers, tended and well-be- 

[89] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

loved. Outside and all around are great trees 
with gnarled trunks and far-off branches 
which have fought their own way in desper- 
ate competition to the sunlight. I could, I 
think, worship very faithfully in that "Little 
Church Round the Corner," but I should have 
to shut New York out of my heart every time 
I passed through the doors of it. Just so I 
can find delight in the sweetness of Keble's 
"Christian Year," but while I do I must for- 
get the sea, and how "at his word the stormy 
wind ariseth which lifteth up the waves there- 
of." I must cease to be in love with the perils 
of adventuring. 

There is one church in New York which 
seems to me to have caught the spirit of the 
city, the unfinished cathedral of St. John the 
Divine. It gives the worshipper within its walls 
a strange sense of titanic strength striving 
majestically to express itself in stone. I am 
told that the building is to be finished in some 
other way, in accordance with the rules and 
orthodoxies of some school of architecture. 
This may not be true, but, even if it is, there 
[90] 



THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 

still remains the hope that enough has been al- 
ready done to preserve for the finished work its 
character of relentless strength. If its build- 
ers are brave enough to go as they have begun, 
this cathedral should rank in the eyes of fu- 
ture generations as one of the great houses of 
God in the world. St. Mark's, with its fan- 
tastic spires and gorgeous coloring, expresses 
all the past history of Venice and her com- 
merce with the East, all which that strange 
republic learnt of the Divine, from the glow 
of Syrian deserts, where sun-baked caravans 
crawled slowly, and from the heavy scents of 
Midianitish merchandise in the market places 
of Damascus. The confused and misty aisles 
of Westminster embody in stone a realized 
conception of the tumultuous life of London, 
of its black river weary with the weight of the 
untold wealth it bears, of its crowds thronging 
narrow places, of its streets where jDast and 
present look suspiciously into each other's eyes, 
while things which are to be already push for 
elbow room. The Cathedral of St. John the 
Divine, standing on the very edge of its steep, 

[91] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

broken hill, gives me as no other building" does 
the sense of strength of the kind of strength 
which will do rather than endure, which is un- 
willing to abide restraint of any kind. 

The building is a fit mate for the skyscrap- 
ers, can hold its own among them because its 
spirit is their spirit, touched with the flame of 
inspiration by the torch of the divine. The 
very absence of unity of style seems the crown- 
ing glory of it. It is Attila's Hun once more. 
What did he care that the spoils in which he 
decked himself were of various fashionings? 
It is the dynamite blasting living rock. It is, 
as it seems to me, New York in process of 
being given in stone an interpretation which 
neither words nor music have given her yet. It 
will be a loss, not only to New York but to the 
world, if the builders of the Cathedral of St. 
John the Divine allow themselves to be fright- 
ened by the spectre of European artistic tra- 
dition. They may tame their church, civilize 
it, curl and comb the seven locks of its hair. 
If they do, the strength will surely depart from 
it and it will become a common thing. 
[92] 



CHAPTER IV 

HOLIDAY FEVER 

We shall always be thankful that we paid a 
visit to Atlantic City. It is not, I believe, one 
of the places of which Americans are particu- 
larly proud. The trains which connect it with 
New York have indeed the reputation of being 
the fastest in the world, but that may not be 
because every one is in a great hurry to get to 
Atlantic City. They run at high speed both 
ways, and it is quite possible that some men 
may be in an equal hurry to get away. Our 
friends were certainly a little cold when we 
said we were going there. Left to ourselves, 
or meekly following, as we generally do, the 
advice given to us by well-instructed people, 
we should not have gone to Atlantic City. But 
we were shepherded there by circumstance, 
fate, or whatever the power is called which 
regulates the minor affairs of life. And we 

[93] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

were glad we went. No one, says Tennyson, 
can be more wise than destiny. Our visit to 
Atlantic City went to prove the truth of that 
profound remark. 

The mean which destiny used for getting us 
to Atlantic City was a play. We had a play 
of our own, and it was produced there for the 
first time on the west side of the Atlantic. 
American theatrical managers believe in ex- 
perimenting with a play in some minor place 
before taking the plunge of the New York 
production. They call this — in a phrase not 
unknown in England — "trying it on the dog." 
It seems to me rather a good plan. The ver- 
dict of the dog is not indeed of great value. 
Dogs, human dogs, are the same everywhere. 
They are afraid to say they like anything which 
has not got the seal of a great city's approval 
set on it. They take refuge in damning with 
dubious phrase; and, in fact, no one with any 
experience much minds what they say. But 
the experimental production has a value of its 
own apart from the opinion of the dog. The 
company shakes dow^n and learns to work to- 
[94] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

gether. The first performance in an impor- 
tant place, when the time comes for it, is much 
more likely to go smoothly if the actors have 
faced audiences, even audiences of the dog 
kind, every night for a week beforehand. 

We did not understand the philosophy of 
these dog productions at first, and were there- 
fore a little nervous all the time we were in 
Atlantic City, but not, I am glad to say, ner- 
vous enough to have our enjoyment of the 
place spoiled. Nothing would induce me to 
say, or for a single moment to think, that At- 
lantic City is in any way a characteristic prod- 
uct of American civilization. All our civiliza- 
tions produce places of this kind. But it is 
fair, I think, to say that America does this 
particular thing better than any other country. 
Superior people might say that America does 
it worse; but I am not superior. I recognize 
that the toiling masses have a right to revel 
during their brief holidays in the way that 
appeals to them as most delightful. I do not 
revel in that way myself; but that is not be- 
cause I have found better ways, but only be- 

[95] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

cause I am growing older and prefer to take 
my hmnble pleasures quietly. When I was 
young I enjoyed tumultuous pleasures as much 
as any one. I revelled with the best of my 
day in the town of Douglas ; and, if I did not 
get as much out of it as I might now if I were 
young again, it was only because there was 
not, in those days, nearly so much in it. The 
holiday resort has been enormously developed 
during the last twenty-five years, and Amer- 
ica, judging by Atlantic City — and I am told 
Coney Island is better — is in the very van of 
human progress. 

I have seen Portrush, our humble Irish at- 
tempt at a pleasure city. I have seen Black- 
pool, which far surpasses Portrush in its op- 
portunities for delight. I have seen the Lido, 
where the Germans bathe. I have seen Brigh- 
ton, which is spoiled by a want of abandon and 
a paralyzing respect for gentility. Atlantic 
City outdoes them all. Atlantic City is Port- 
rush, Blackpool, Brighton, the Lido, and Os- 
tend rolled into one, and then, in all the essen- 
tial features of such places, raised to the third 
[96] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

power, so to speak; multiplied by itself and 
then multiplied by itself again. 

Our friends, as I have hinted, warned us 
against Atlantic City. They said: 

."You won't enjoy that place." 

Or, varying the emphasis in a way very flat- 
tering to our reputations for cultivated gen- 
tiUty: 

''You won't enjoy that place." 

Or, altering the emphasis once more, after 
we had explained apologetically that we went 
there on business: 

"You won't enjoy that place." 

When we persisted in going, they took it for 
granted that we wanted to argue with them. 
Then they closed the discussion with an em- 
phatic insistence on the one word which had 
hitherto escaped them. 

"You wont enjoy that place." 

One friend, mistaking us for cynical stu- 
dents of the weaknesses and follies of human- 
ity, varied the warning in another way: 

"You won't," he said, "enjoy it now. It's 
not the season." 

[97] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

They were all wrong. In spite of the pri- 
vate anxiety which gnawed at our hearts, we 
did enjoy Atlantic City. We enjoyed it all 
the more because we went there out of season. 
It is our deliberate practice to visit places of 
this kind out of season, and the date of the 
production of our play at Atlantic City was a 
most fortunate one for us. We no longer 
want to revel. The time for that is past for 
us, but we do want to understand, and we seem 
to get nearer that when the chief side shows 
are closed, when the hotels are being painted, 
and when the sea has given up the attempt to 
sparlde and look cheerful. In one of Mr. An- 
thony Hope's novels there is a statesman of 
great craftiness who warns a Prince Consort 
that he must not think he knows the Queen, 
his wdfe, because he is allowed to see her in 
her stays. I daresaj^ there is a good deal in 
the warning. But I cannot help feeling that 
you would understand a queen better if you 
saw her frequently, let us say in her dressing 
gown, than if you never saw her except in her 
robes of state, with the crown royal firmly 
[98] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

fixed on her head with hairpins. It must be 
the same with pleasure cities. One knows them, 
not well, but a little better when they have 
tucked up their skirts, put on old blouses and 
turned to the task of cleaning up after the 
festivities. 

It is more instructive to walk along the broad 
sea front of Blackpool through a fine chill mist 
of January rain than to stand there on a blaz- 
ing August day when the colliers' week of 
holiday is in full swing. Deeper thoughts 
come to him who gazes at the forlorn rows of 
notices that lodgings are to let within than 
to him who hurries through street after street, 
looking for some place in which to lay his 
head. I am sure that I catch the essential 
spirit of the Lido when the November sea is 
brown, when the sands are drab, when the thou- 
sands of bathing boxes stand locked and 
empty, than I would if smiling wavelets en- 
ticed plump Germans to splash in them and 
hruat jyaars lingered, indecently affectionate, 
in the shadows behind. I did once, accident- 
ally, see Portrush in the very height of its sea- 

[99] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

son, and it was a disappointment to me. Bevies 
of girls, hatless but with hair elaborately 
dressed, paraded the streets with their arms 
round each others' waists. Critical young men, 
in well-creased suits of the kind supposed to 
be suitable for yachting, watched other girls 
being taught to swim in a deep pool. Nurse- 
maids helped children to build sand castles. 
Mothers of forty years of age or thereabouts 
sat uncomfortably knitting with their backs 
against the rocks. More than five thousand 
people carried hand cameras about. Lovers, 
united for a day or two, wrote each others' 
names in huge letters on the sand, where the 
retiring tide had left it smooth and diy. There 
was too much to feel, far too much to think 
about. I grew confused and desperate. I 
could not understand. Out of season the ob- 
server has a better chance. If Portrush con- 
fused me, Atlantic Citj% seen in its full glorj^ 
would have bewildered me utterly. Also out 
of season I am not tormented with vain re- 
grets. I am spared the vexation of feeling 
that a yachting suit, carefully creased, would 
[100] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

no longer lift my heart up to the skies. It is 
not forced upon me that my pulses no longer 
throb wildly at the sight of girls who smile. 
I do not think how sad it is that I shall never 
again want to win the applause of a crowd 
by taking a header into deep water from a 
giddy height. I am glad that we visited At- 
lantic City out of season. 

I forget how many piers Atlantic City has, 
but it is unusually rich in these structures, and 
I have no doubt that the builders of them were 
wise. A pier makes an irresistible appeal to 
the pleasure-seeker. He would rather dance 
on a pier, under proper shelter, of course, and 
on a good floor, than in a well-appointed salon 
on solid land. He would rather eat ices on a 
pier than in an ordinary shop, though he has 
to pay more for them, the cost of the ice being 
the same and the two pence for entry into the 
enchanted region being an extra. A cinemato- 
graph show draws more customers if it is on a 
pier. The reason of this is that the normal 
and properly constituted holiday-maker wants 
to get as much sea as he can. When he is not 

[101] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

in it he likes to have it all round him, or as 
nearly all round him as possible without going 
in a boat. Boats, for several reasons, are un- 
desirable. They sometimes make people sick. 
They are expensive. They demand an undi- 
vided allegiance. You cannot have a cine- 
matograph, for instance, in a boat. The near- 
est thing to a boat is a pier. It is almost sur- 
rounded by the sea. That is why piers are a 
regular feature of up-to-date pleasure cities, 
and why Atlantic City has so many of them. 
It is all to the credit of our revelers that they 
love to be near the sea, to feel it round them, 
to hear it splashing under their feet. The sea 
is the cleanest thing there is. You can vulgar- 
ize it, but it is almost impossible, except at the 
heads of long estuaries, to dirty it. It seems 
as if pleasure-seekers, who are also seekers of 
the sea, must be essentially clean people, clean- 
hearted, otherwise they would not feel as 
strongly impelled as they evidentlj^ do to get 
into touch with the ocean. And it is real ocean 
at Atlantic City. Far out one sees ships pass- 
ing, the lean three-masted schooners of the 
[102] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

American coasting trade, trawlers in fleets, 
tramp steamers, companionless things, all of 
these given to the real business of the sea, not 
to pleasure voyaging. The eye lingers on 
them, and it is hard afterwards to adjust the 
focus of the mental vision to the long wooden 
parade, itself almost a pier, the flaunting sky 
signs, the innumerable tiny shops where every 
kind of useless thing is sold. Atlantic City 
has, indeed, some boats of its own, boats which 
go out from a haven tucked away behind the 
north corner of the parade, and pass up and 
down across the sea front. Their sails are 
covered with huge advertisements of cigar- 
ettes and chewing gums. They are manned, 
no doubt, by the kind of longshoremen who 
cater for the trippers' pleasure. They have in 
them as passengers whoever in America cor- 
responds to the London cockney. Among 
ships which sail these are surely as the women 
of the streets. But you cannot altogether de- 
grade a boat. She retains some pathetic rem- 
nant of her dignity, even if you make her sails 
into advertisement hoardings. It was good to 

[103] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

watch these boats, their masts set far forward, 
after the American catboat fashion, making 
short, swift tacks among the sand banks over 
which the Atlantic rollers foamed threaten- 
ingly. 

It is easy to understand why the shops along 
seafronts of places like Atlantic City are for 
the most part devoted to the sale of useless 
things. Picture postcards I reckon to be very 
nearly useless. They give a transient gleam 
of pleasure to the buyer, none at all to the 
person who receives them. The whole class of 
goods called souvenirs is entirely useless. The 
photographs taken by seaside artists are not 
such as can give any satisfaction to the sitters 
afterwards. Yet the impulse to buy these 
things and to be photographed is almost irre- 
sistible. We yielded, not to the seductions of 
the photographers, nor to the lure of the souve- 
nir-sellers, but with shameless self-abandon- 
ment to the postcard shops. I found it very 
hard to pass any of them without buying. I 
still have many of the Atlantic City postcards, 
and I look at them whenever I feel in danger 
[104] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

of growing conceited in order to reduce my- 
self to a proi^er condition of humility. We 
also — amoved by what strange impulse? — 
bought several instruments for cutting up po- 
tatoes. Under ordinary circumstances a po- 
tato-chopper has no attractions whatever for 
me. I could pass a shop window filled with 
them and not feel one prick of covetous de- 
sire. And Atlantic City, of all places in the 
world, was for us — I suppose in some degree 
for every visitor — most unsuitable for the pur- 
chase of kitchen utensils. We knew, even 
while we bought them, that we should have to 
haul them with us round America and back 
across the Atlantic, that they would be a per- 
petual nuisance to us all the time, and in all 
probability no use whatever when we got them 
home. Yet we bought them. If the dollar we 
spent on them had been the last we possessed 
we should have bought them all the same. 
Such is the strange effect of places like At- 
lantic City on people who are in other places 
sane enough. I can analyze and understand 
the impulse well enough though I cannot re- 

[105] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

sist it. It is the holiday spirit of the place 
which gets a hold on visitors. All a whole 
long year we commonplace people, who are not 
millionaires, are spending our money warily 
on things of carefully calculated usefulness. 
We watch each shilling and see that it buys 
its full worth of something which will make 
life more tolerable or pleasant. Then comes 
the brief holiday, and with it the sudden loos- 
ing of all bonds of ordinary restraint. Our 
souls revolt against spending money on things 
which are any real good to us. We want, we 
are compelled to fling it from us, asking in 
exchange nothing but trifles light as air. In 
desperate reaction against the tyranny of do- 
mestic economics we even insist on buying 
things, like potato cutters, which will be an 
actual encumbrance to us afterwards. 

Cowper represents John Gilpin's wife as 
insisting on taking her own wine on a pleasure 
party and writes of her that 

"Though on pleasure she was bent 

She had a frugal mind." 
[106] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

I refuse to believe that of any human being, 
and I count Cowper a good poet but a bad 
psychologist. The man who brought a load 
of potato-cutters down to Atlantic City was 
probably not a poet at all, but he had a pro- 
found knowledge of human nature. He knew 
that he would sell the things there. It was 
the place of all places in the world for his 
trade. It is a high tribute to Atlantic City 
as a holiday resort that it forced us to buy 
two of these machines. None of the other 
pleasure cities we have visited have had such a 
drastic effect upon us. Postcards we yield to 
everywhere. Even the dreariest of second- 
rate watering places can sell them to us. In 
Blackpool I found a paper-knife irresistible. 
In Portrush I once bought a colored mug. 
Atlantic City alone could have sold me potato- 
choppers, two of them. 

In towns and rural districts where men and 
women live their ordinary lives, work, love and 
ultimately die, it is the rarest thing possible 
to see any grown person wheeled about in a 
perambulator or bath chair. Occasionally some 

[107] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

pitiful victim of a surgeon's skill is lifted out 
of the door of a nursing home and placed 
tenderly in one of these vehicles. He is 
wheeled about in the fresh air in obedience to 
the doctor's orders, no doubt in hope that he 
will recover sufficient strength to make another 
operation possible. But a bath chair, even now 
when surgery has become a recognized form of 
sport, is a very unusual sight. In all pleas- 
ure cities it is quite common. In Brighton, 
for instance, or at Bournemouth, any one who 
can, with any chance of being believed, repre- 
sent himself as an invalid, takes advantage of 
his infirmity to get himself wheeled about in 
a bath chair. At international exhibitions and 
in some of the greater picture galleries which 
are also pleasure resorts it is generally possible 
to hire a bath chair. Atlantic City, being, as 
I believe, the greatest of all such places, has 
devised a kind of glorified perambulator, some- 
thing far more seductive than a bath chair. 
It has room for two in it, and this in itself is 
a great advance. It has the neatest imagi- 
nable hood, which you can pull over you in case 
[108] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

of rain or if you desire privacy. It looks some- 
thing like a very small but sumptuously ap- 
pointed motor car. 

You need not even pretend to be a cripple 
in Atlantic City in order to make good your 
right to enter one of these chairs. All sorts 
of people, brisk-looking young girls and men 
whose limbs are plainly sound, are wheeled 
about, not only shamelessly but with evident 
enjoyment. There are immense numbers of 
these vehicles, more, surely, than there are in- 
valids in the whole world. Out of season, 
when we saw them, they are absurdly cheap, 
almost the only thing in America except oys- 
ters and chocolates, and, curiously enough, sHk 
stockings, which are cheap judged by Euro- 
pean standards. I longed very earnestly to 
go in one of these vehicles, but at the last mo- 
ment I always shrank from the strangeness 
of it. Neither the taxi of the London streets 
nor the outside car of my native land ever 
made so strong an appeal to me as these peram- 
bulators of Atlantic City. I suppose it was 
the holiday spirit of the place again. Girls 

[109] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

and young men, certainly middle-aged men, 
would feel like fools if they sat in perambu- 
lators anywhere else, but it is a sweet and pleas- 
ant thing — according to a Latin poet who 
must have known — to play the fool in the 
proper place. Atlantic City is the proper 
place. Hence the enormous numbers of per- 
ambulators. 

The hotels in Atlantic City are, most of 
them, as fantastic in appearance as the place 
itself. I imagine that the architects who 
planned them must, before they began their 
work, have been kept for weeks on the sea- 
front and forced to go to all the entertain- 
ments which offered themselves by day and 
night. They were probably fed on crab dressed 
in various ways and given gin rickeys to drink. 
Then, when allowed to drop to sleep in the 
early morning, they would naturally dream. 
At the end of a fortnight or so of this treat- 
ment their dreams would be imprinted on their 
memories and they would draw plans of hotels 
suitable for Atlantic City. Only in this way, 
I think, can some of the newer hotels have 
[110] 



HOLIDAY FEVER 

been conceived. They are not ugly, far from 
it. Crab, dressed as American cooks dress it, 
does not induce nightmares, nor is a gin rickey 
nearly so terrific a drink as it sounds. The 
architect merely dreams, as Coleridge did when 
his Kubla Khan decreed a stately pleasure 
dome in Xamadu. But Coleridge dreamed on 
opium and his visions were of stately things. 
The Atlantic City hotel is less stately than 
fantastic. It is a building which any one would 
declare to be impossible if he did not see it in 
actual existence. 

It will always be a source of regret to me 
that I did not stay in one of these hotels which 
captivated me utterly. It was just what, as a 
boy, I used to imagine that the palace of the 
Sleeping Beauty must be. A look at it brought 
back dear memories of the transformation 
scenes of pantomimes, in the days before 
transformation scenes went out of fashion. It 
was colored pale green all over, and, looked at 
with half -closed eyes, made me think of mer- 
maids. I am sure that it was perfectly de- 
lightful inside; but we did not stay there. A 

[111] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

friend had recommended to us another hotel, 
of great excellence and comfort, but built be- 
fore Atlantic City understood the proper way 
to treat architects. In any case we could not 
have stayed in the pale green hotel. It was 
closed. We were in Atlantic City out of 
season. 



[112] 



CHAPTER V 

THE IRON TRAIL 

Our luck, which had up to that point been 
as good as luck could be, failed us miserably 
when we started for Chicago. The very day 
before we left New York there was a blizzard 
and a snowstorm. Not in New York itself. 
There was only a very strong wind there. Nor 
in Chicago, but all over the district which lay 
between. One train was held up for eighteen 
hours in a snowdrift. The last fragments of 
food in the restaurant car were consumed, and 
the passengers arrived chilled and desperately 
hungry at their destination. We might have 
been in that train. It was not, indeed, pos- 
sible for us to leave New York a day sooner 
than we did; but I cannot see why the bliz- 
zard could not have waited a little. Twenty- 
four hours' delay would have made no differ- 
ence to it. It might even have gathered force. 

[113] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

To us it would have made all the difference in 
the world. We missed a great experience. 
That is why I say that our luck failed us at 
this point. 

It would not, at the moment, have been a 
pleasant experience, and I do not pretend that 
we should have enjoyed either the cold or the 
hunger; and we are not the sort of people who, 
under such circumstances, secure the last sar- 
dine. We should, owing to our feebleness in 
self-assertion, have been among the first to go 
foodless. But afterwards we could have 
thought about it and all our lives told steadily 
improving stories about the adventure. The 
recollection of it would have added zest to 
every remaining hour of comfort in our lives. 
What is a short spell of suifering compared 
to such enduring joys? But in these matters 
we have been singularly unlucky through life. 
We have never been in a shipwreck or a rail- 
way accident or been forced to escape from a 
burning house. Only once did a horse run 
away with us, and it fell almost immediately 
after making its dash for liberty. No burglar 
[114] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

has roused us to do battle with him in the 
middle of the night. It seems hard, when we 
have been denied all the great adventures of 
life, to miss by the narrow margin of a single 
day the minor excitement of being snowed up 
in a train. 

However, it is useless to complain. The 
thing was not to be and it was not. Our jour- 
ney was commonplace and unadventurous. We 
hired what is called a drawing-room car on our 
train. This is an extravagant thing to do. 
For people of our humble means it is almost 
criminally reckless. Some day when we can- 
not afford to have our boots re-soled, when we 
are looking at the loaves in the windows of 
bakers' shops with vain desire, when we have 
neither money nor credit left to us, we shall 
think with poignant regret of the huge sums 
we spent on that drawing-room car. We shall 
be sorry, at least one of us will be sorry that 
we were not more careful when he or she, the 
survivor, cannot afford a simple tombstone to 
mark the grave of the other. But at the mo- 
ment the money, in spite of Atlantic City, 

[115] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

being actually in our pockets, we felt that the 
drawing-room car was an absolute necessity. 
I should take it again if I were going to Chi- 
cago. But then we are not yet reduced to 
penury. 

The alternative to a drawing-room car, on 
most trains, is a section in a Pullman sleeping- 
car. Against this we rose in revolt. I cannot 
imagine how the Americans, who are in many 
waj^s much more highly civilized than Euro- 
peans, tolerate the existence of Pullman sleep- 
ing-cars. I am not physically — though I am 
in every other way — an exceptionally modest 
man. I have, for instance, no objection to 
mixed bathing, and it does not make me blush 
to meet one of the housemaids in a hotel when, 
dressed only in my pajamas, I am searching 
for the bathroom. But I do object to un- 
dressing in the corridor of a Pullman sleeping- 
car, and I cannot, not being a professional ac- 
robat, undress in my berth. For a lady the 
thing is, of course, much worse. Besides the 
undressing and the still more difficult dressing 
again, there is the business of washing in the 
[116] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

morning, washing and, for most men, shaving. 
You go into a sort of dressing-room to do 
that. There are not nearly basins enough. 
There is not room enough. Somebody is sure 
to walk on your sponge, will walk on your 
toothbrush, too, unless you happen to be a 
clerk, and therefore practiced in the art of 
holding things behind your ear. 

I think Americans are beginning to recog- 
nize that these sleeping-cars are barbarous. I 
met one lady who told me that she would al- 
ways gladly sacrifice a new dress in order to 
spend the money on a drawing-room car. I 
entirely sympathize with her; but, even if you 
are prepared for these heroic extravagances, 
you cannot always get a drawing-room car. 
There was one occasion on which we failed, 
though we telegraphed three days before to 
engage one. On some of the best trains of 
the best lines there are also what are called 
"compartments." These are comparable in 
comfort to the cabins of the International 
Company of Wagon Lits on the Continental 
trains de luxe, though inferior to the London 

[117] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

and North Western Railway Company's sleep- 
er. No one has any right to grumble who 
secures a compartment. Unfortunately, it is 
not every railway company which has them, 
and it is by no means every train on which they 
are run. 

The drawing-room car, when you get it, is 
in itself a comfortable thing to travel in. 
There is a good deal of room in it. There 
is satisfactory lavatory accommodation. The 
attendants are civil and competent. Any 
one who can sleep in a train at all could sleep 
in a drawing-room car if only he were not 
waked up every time the train stops or starts. 
Trains must stop occasionally, of course. But 
there is no real need for emphasizing the stops 
as American trains do. It is possible — I know 
this, because both the French and English 
trains do it — to stop without giving inexperi- 
enced passengers the impression that there has 
been a collision. Stopping is not a thing a 
train ought to be proud of. There is no reason 
whj^ the attention of passengers should be 
drawn to it forcibly. For starting with a bang 
[118] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

there is, of course, more excuse. To start at 
all is a triumph. It is a victory of mind over 
inert matter, and any one who accomplishes it 
wants, naturally and properly, to be admired. 
I can understand the annoyance of the train, 
conscious of being able to start, at feeling that 
its passengers, who ought to be praising it, are 
perhaps sound asleep. Yet I cannot help 
thinking that all the admiration any train 
ought to want might be secured without ex- 
cessive violence. Suppose a notice were hung 
up in every coach: "This train will stop twice 
during the night and after each stop will start 
again. Passengers are requested to realize 
that this is not an easy thing to do. They w411 
therefore admire the train." No passenger 
with a spark of decent feeling in him would 
refuse an appreciative pat to the engine in 
the morning. We do as much for horses who 
cannot drag us nearly so far or half so fast. 
We do it for dogs who do not drag us at all, 
only fetch things for us. We should certainly 
treat engines with the same kindness if they 
were a little tenderer to us. But I refuse to 

[119] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

pat, stroke or in any way fondle an engine 
which, out of mere vanity, wakes me up by 
starting boisterously. 

We ran during the night through the tail 
of the snowstorm which had stopped the train 
the day before. We had left New York in 
pleasant autumn weather, on one of those days 
which, without being cold, has an exhilarating 
nip about it. We arrived in Chicago in what 
seemed to us midsummer weather, though I 
believe it was not really hot for Chicago. We 
passed on our way through a snow-covered 
district and had the greatest difficulty in keep- 
ing warm during the night. This is one of 
the advantages of traveling in America. The 
distances are so immense that in the course of 
a single journey you have the chance of trying 
several kinds of climate. In England you get 
the same result by staying in one place. But 
the American plan is much better. There, 
having discovered a climate which suits you, 
you can settle down in it with a fair amount 
of confidence that it will remain what it is for 
a week or two at a time. In England, whether 
[120] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

you travel about or stay still, you have got to 
accustom yourself to continual variety. 

After breakfast, when the train had passed 
the snow-covered region and the air became a 
little warmer, we sat on the platform at the 
end of the observation car and looked out at 
the country through which we were going. 
Nothing could conceivably be more monoto- 
nous. The land was quite flat, the railway line 
was absolutely straight. The train sped on 
at a uniform pace of about forty miles an 
hour. As far back as the ej^e could see were 
the rails of the track, narrowing and narrow- 
ing until they looked like a single sharp line, 
ruled with remorseless precision from some 
point at an infinite distance in the east. On 
each side of us were broad spaces of flat land, 
reaching, still flat, to the horizons north and 
south of us. Every half-hour or so we passed 
a village, a collection of meanly conceived, two- 
storied houses with a hideous little church 
standing just apart from them. Hour after 
hour we rushed on with no other change of 
scenery, no mountain, no lake, no river, just 

[121] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

flat land, with a straight line ruled on it. It 
was incredibly monotonous. I suppose that 
the life of the people who inhabit that region 
is as interesting, in reality, as any other life. 
The seasons change there, I hope. Harvests 
ripen, cows calve, men die; but on us, strang- 
ers from a very different land, the unvarying 
flatness of it all lay like an intolerable weight. 
Yet that journey gave me, more than any- 
thing else I saw, a sense of the greatness of the 
American people. There is, I suppose, some 
one thing in the history of every nation which 
impresses the man who realizes, even dimly, 
the meaning of it, more than anything else 
does. Elizabethan England's buccaneering 
adventures to the Spanish main seem to me 
to make intelligible the peculiar greatness of 
England more than anything else her people 
have ever done. Revolutionary France in arms 
against Europe is France at her most glori- 
ous, with her special splendor at its brightest. 
So my imagination fixes on America's settle- 
ment of her vast central plain as the greatest 
thing in her story. Her fight for independ- 
[122] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

ence was fine, of course; but many other na- 
tions have fought such wars and won,- or, just 
as finely, lost. Her civil war stirs thoughts of 
greatness in any one who reads it. But this 
tremendous journey of the American people 
from the east to the Mississippi shores, half- 
way across a continent, was something greater 
than any war. 

First, no doubt, hunters went out from the 
narrow strip of settled seaboard land. They 
pushed their adventurous way across the Alle- 
ghanies, finding passes, camping in strange 
fastnesses. They came upon the westward- 
flowing waters of the great network of rivers 
which drain into the ^lississippi. They made 
their long, dim trails. They fought, with 
equal cunning, bands of Indian braves. They 
returned, in love with wildness, weaned from 
the ways of civilization, to tell their tales of 
strange places by the firesides of sober men. 
Or they did not return. They were great men, 
and their achievements very great, but not the 
greatest. 

More wonderful was the accomplishment of 

[123] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

those long streams of settlers who crossed Vir- 
ginia and Pennsylvania to find the upper 
reaches of the waterways which should lead 
and bear them mile by mile to the Mississippi 
shore. It is barely a century since these men, 
home lovers, not wanderers with the call of 
the wild in their ears, home builders, not hunt- 
ers, went floating in rude arks down the Ohio, 
the Cumberland, the Tennessee. With unim- 
aginable courage and faith they took with them 
women, children, cattle, and household plen- 
ishing. Somewhere each ark grounded and 
the work of settlement began. I saw the 
woods which stretch for miles over rolling 
hills and round lakes beyond that curious col- 
ony of very wealthy people at Tuxedo. ]My 
imagination pictured for me, as I gazed at 
these woods, the outpost settlements of one 
hundred years ago. The "half-faced camp," 
rudest of the dwellings of civilized man, was 
built. Trees were "girdled" or cut down with 
patient toil. A small clearing was made amid 
the interminable miles of forest land. I im- 
agined the men, lean and grim, the anxious 
[124] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

women, ever on the alert because of the per- 
petual menace of the Indians who might lurk 
a stone's throw off among the shadows of the 
trees. 

We can guess at the satisfaction of each tri- 
umph won ; the day when the lean-to shed with 
its open side gave place to the log hut, still 
rude enough; the day when some great tree, 
sapless from its "girdling," was hewn down 
at last ; the adding of acre after acre of cleared 
land; the incredibly swift growth of villages 
and towns; the pushing out of settlements, 
south and north, into yet stranger wilder- 
nesses, away from the friendly banks of the 
waterways. The courage and endurance of 
these settlers must have been far beyond that 
required of soldiers, explorers or adventurers. 
Step by step, almost literally step by step, 
they made this wonderful journey, conquer- 
ing every acre as they passed it. Yet we know 
very little about them. Homer made a list 
of the ships which sailed for Troy. Who has 
chronicled the arks and rafts of these still 
braver men? Camoens wrote his Luciad to 

[125] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

glorify the voyage of Vasco da Gama round 
the African coast. All England's Elizabethan 
literature is, rightly understood, an interpre- 
tation of the spirit of Drake and Raleigh. No 
one has written an epic of these American 
pioneer settlers. Yet surely if ever men de- 
served such commemoration they did. 

Our train ran on and on at forty miles an 
hour, and my spirit was cowed by the vast 
monotony. What sort of spirit had the men 
who faced it first, to whom the conquest of a 
mile was a great achievement, to whom it must 
have seemed that there was no end to it at all? 
I wonder whether there was in them some great 
kind of faith, of which we have lost the secret 
now, a belief that God Himself had bidden 
them go forward? Or perhaps there was 
strong in them that instinct for the conquest 
of nature which, whether he knew it or not, 
has always been in man, which has made him 
greater than the beasts, only a little lower than 
the angels. Or perhaps it was hunger for life 
itself, not for a fuller or a richer life, but for 
the bare material existence, which sent them 
[126] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

on, threatened by want in civilized places, to 
look for ground where things would grow, 
where the fruit of their toil would not be taken 
from them. To find a parallel for the achieve- 
ment of these men the mind must go back to 
dim ages before history began, when our an- 
cestors — why and how we cannot guess — 
learned to light fires, chip flints, snare beasts, 
make laws ; groped through a palpable obscur- 
ity toward justice and right, fought those im- 
possible battles of theirs which have won for 
us the kingship of the world. Theirs was an 
achievement greater indeed than that of Amer- 
ica's pioneer settlers, but of the same kind. 

I went to church in New York on Thanks- 
giving Day, and I, though a stranger, was 
given the privilege of reading aloud that won- 
derful chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy 
which tells how God led His people through a 
great and terrible wilderness. I forgot, as I 
read it, all about Israel and Sinai. I remem- 
bered how the people among whom I was had 
journeyed across their vast continent. They 
are not my people. Their glory is none of 

[127] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

mine. Their Thanksgiving Day had nothing 
to do with me, but emotion thrilled me strange- 
ly as I read. I wondered, thanked, and bent 
my head with fear, so great was the past which 
is remembered, so terrible the warning which 
follows the recital. "Beware lest thou at all 
forget the Lord thy God." 

The observation car, with its sheltered plat- 
form at the back of it, is a pleasant feature of 
the long-distance American train, one which 
might, with advantage, be copied in Europe. 
But the best thing, the most wholly satisfac- 
tory, about American railway traveling is that 
certain trains are fined for being late. This 
happens in England, I think, certainly in Ire- 
land, in the case of mail trains. It does them 
a lot of good, but gives small gratification to 
the suffering passengers, because the Post- 
Office authorities take the money. In Amer- 
ica the passengers get the fine. Our train was 
an hour and a quarter late in getting to Chi- 
cago, and we were handed a dollar each as 
compensation for our annoyance. I felt sor- 
rier than ever that we had not traveled the day 
[128] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

before in the train that was delayed by the 
bhzzard. Then we should have got eighteen 
dollars each and been able to buy several splen- 
did dinners to make up for our starvation. 

It is not every train in America which pays 
for unpunctuality in this way. I am not sure 
that the rule applies even to express trains all 
over the continent, nor do I know whether the 
railway companies deal thus justly with their 
passengers of their own free will. It seems 
very unlikely that they do. I am inclined to 
think that there must be a law on the subject, 
either a law made by the State of Illinois or, 
as I hope, one made by Congress itself. How- 
ever this may be, I have no doubt at all that the 
law, if it is a law, ought to be made and strictly 
enforced in every civilized country. I traveled 
once by a London & North Western Railway 
express train, which was three hours late; and 
I suffered a loss, was actually obliged to dis- 
perse no less a sum than £2-18-0 in conse- 
quence. I tried in vain to make the company 
see that it ought to pay me back that £2-18-0. 
I never got a penny. Yet the offense of the 

[129] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

American company was a trifling one in com- 
parison. It was one hour and a quarter late 
in a journey supposed to occupy twenty- three 
hours. The London & North Western Rail- 
way took nine hours over a journey which it 
professed to do in six. I cannot help feeling 
that the English company would have got its 
train to London on that occasion much more 
rapidly if it had known beforehand that it 
might have to pay each passenger fifteen shill- 
ings at Euston. We hear a great deal on this 
side of the Atlantic about the scandalous way 
in which American railway magnates control 
American legislation. It appears that occa- 
sionally, at all events, the legislators exercise a 
very salutary control over the railways. 

Charges of corrupting senates are certainly 
made against American railway directors. 
They may conceivably be true. If they are it 
seems desirable, in the interests of the pas- 
sengers, that some of the British railways 
would take in hand the task of corrupting the 
House of Commons in the American way. The 
morals of that assembly could in no case be 
[130] 



THE IRON TRAIL 

much worse than they are, so there would be 
httle loss in that way, while the gain to the 
public would be immense if trains, even a few 
of the best trains, were forced under heavy 
penalties to keep time. 



[131] 



CHAPTER VI 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO 



Chicago possesses one exceedingly good 
hotel. We know this by experience. The 
other hotels in the city may be equally good, 
but we shall never try them. Having found 
one almost perfect hotel, we shall, whenever 
we visit that city again, go back to it. But I 
expect that all the other hotels there are good 
too, very good ; for Chicago appears to take an 
interest in its hotels. In most cities, perhaps 
in all other cities, hotels are good or bad ac- 
cording as their managers are efficient or the 
reverse. The city itself does not care about 
its hotels any more than it cares about its boot- 
makers. A London bootmaker might provide 
very bad leather for the soles of a stranger's 
boots. "The Times" would not deal with that 
bootmaker in a special article. It might be 
[132] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

very difficult to obtain hot water in one of the 
great London hotels — I have seen it stated, on 
the authority of an American, that it is very 
difficult — but London itself does not care 
whether it is or not. The soling of boots and 
the comfort of casual guests are, according to 
the generally prevailing view, aifairs best 
settled betwen the people directly interested, 
the traveler on the one hand and the boot- 
maker or manager on the other. No one else 
thinks that he has a right to interfere. 

Chicago takes a different view. It has a 
sense of civic responsibility for its hotels, pos- 
sibly also for its bootmakers. I did not try the 
bootmakers and therefore cannot say anything 
certainly about them. But I am sure about 
the hotels. It happened that there was a let- 
ter awaiting my arrival at the hotel, the very 
excellent hotel, in which we stayed. This let- 
ter was not immediately delivered to me. I 
believe that I ought to have asked for it, that 
the hotel manager expects guests to ask for 
letters, and that I had no reasonable ground 
of complaint when the letter was not delivered 

[133] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

to me. Nor did I complain. I am far too 
meek a man to complain about anything in a 
large hotel. I am desperately afraid of hotel 
officials. They are all much grander than I am 
and occupy far more important positions in 
the world. I should not grumble if a princess 
trod on mj^ toe. Princesses have a right, ow- 
ing to the splendour of their position, to 
trample on me. But I would rather grumble 
at a princess than complain to a head waiter or 
the clerk in charge of the offices of a large ho- 
tel. Princesses are common clay compared to 
these functionaries. But even if I were a very 
brave man, and even if I believed that one man 
was as good as another and I the equal of the 
manager of a large hotel, I should not have 
complained about the failure to deliver that let- 
ter. The hotel when we were there was very 
full, and full of the most important kind of 
people, doctors. It was not to be expected that 
such a trifle as a letter for me would engage the 
attention of anybody. 

Next morning there was a paragraph in one 
of the leading Chicago papers about my let- 
[134] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

ter and the manager of the hotel was told 
plainly, in clear print, that he must do his 
business better than he did. I was astonished 
when the manager, taking me solemnly apart, 
showed me the paragraph, astonished and ter- 
ror-stricken. I apologized at once for daring 
to have a letter addressed to me at his hotel. 
I apologized for not asking for it when I ar- 
rived. I apologized for the trouble his staff 
had been put to in carrying the letter up to my 
room in the end. Then I stopped apologizing 
because, to my amazement, the manager be- 
gan. He apologized so amply that I came 
gradually to feel as if I were not entirely in 
the wrong. Also I realized why it is that this 
hotel — and no doubt all the others in Chicago 
— is so superlatively good. Chicago keeps an 
eye on them. The press is alive to the fact that 
every citizen of a great city, even a hotel man- 
ager, should do not merely his duty but more, 
should practice counsels of perfection, per- 
form works of supererogation, deliver letters 
which are not asked for. 

The incident is in itself unimportant, but 

[135] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

it seems to me to illustrate the spirit of Chi- 
cago. It is a great city and is determined to 
get things done right. It has besides, and this 
is its rare distinction, an unfaltering convic- 
tion that it can get things done right. Most 
communities are conscious of some limitations 
of their powers. For Chicago there are no 
limitations at all anywhere. Whatever ought 
to be done Chicago will do. Nothing is too 
small, nothing too great to be attempted and 
carried through. It may be an insignificant 
matter, like the comfort of a helpless and fool- 
ish stranger. It may be a problem against 
which civilized societ^^ has broken its teeth for 
centuries, like the evil of prostitution. Chicago 
is convinced that it can be got right and Chi- 
cago means to do it. 

I admire this sublime self-confidence. I 
ought always to be happy when I am among 
men who have it, because I was born in Bel- 
fast and the first air I breathed was charged 
with exactly this same intensely bracing ozone 
of strong-willedness. 

Belfast is very Hke Chicago. If a Belfast 
[136] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

man were taken while asleep and transported 
on a magic carpet to Chicago, he would not, 
on waking up, feel that anything very strange 
had happened to him. The outward circum- 
stances of life would indeed be different, but 
he would find himself in all essential respects 
at home. He would talk to men who said "We 
will," with a conviction that their "We will" 
is the last word which can or need be said on 
any subject; just as he had all his life before 
talked to men who said, "We won't," with the 
same certainty that beyond their "We won't" 
there was nothing. 

Chicago is, indeed, greater than Belfast, not 
merely in the number of its inhabitants and 
the importance of its business, but in the fact 
that it asserts where Belfast denies. It is a 
greater and harder thing to say "Yes" than 
"No." But there is a spiritual kinship between 
the two places in that both of them mean what 
they say and are quite sure that they can make 
good their "yes" and "no" against the world. 
If aU the rest of America finds itself up 
against Chicago as the British empire is at 

[137] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

present up against Belfast, the result will be 
the bewilderment of the rest of America. 

I was in Chicago only for a short time. I 
did not see any of the things which visitors 
usually see there. I went there with certain 
prejudices. I had read, like every one else, 
Mr. Upton Sinclair's account of the slaughter 
of pigs in Chicago. I had read several times 
over the late Mr. Frank Norris's "The Pit." 
I had read and heard many things about the 
wonderful work of Miss Jane Addams. I had 
a vague idea that Chicago was both better and 
worse than other places, that God and the devil 
had joined battle there more definitely than 
elsewhere, that the points at issue were plainer, 
that there was something nearer to a straight 
fight in Chicago between good and evil than 
we find in other places. 

"We are here," says Matthew Arnold, "as on 

a darkling plain, 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and 

flight. 
Where ignorant armies strive by night." 

[138] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

In Chicago I felt the armies would be less 
ignorant, the alarms a little less confused. I 
am not sure now that this is so. It may be 
quite as hard in Chicago as it is anywhere else 
to find out quite certainly what is right ; which, 
in certain tangled matters, is God's side and 
which the devil's. But I do not believe that 
the Chicago man, any more than the Belfast 
man, is tormented with the paralysis of inde- 
cision. He may and very likely will do a great 
many things which will turn out in the end 
not to be good things. But he will do them 
quite unfalteringly. When, having done them, 
he has time to look round at the far side of 
them, he may discover that there was some 
mistake about them somewhere. Then he will 
undo them and do something else instead with 
the same vigorous conviction. He will, in any 
case, keep on doing things and believing in 
them. 

I was in a large bookseller's shop while I 
was in Chicago. It was so large that it was 
impossible to discover with any certainty what 
pleases Chicago most in the way of literature. 

[139] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

There seemed to me to be copies of every 
book I had ever heard of waiting there for 
buyers, and, I presume, they would not wait 
unless buyers were likely to come. But I was 
struck with the very large number of books 
dealing with those subjects which may be 
classed roughly under the term Eugenics. 
There were more of these books in that shop 
than I had ever seen before. I should not have 
guessed that there were so many in the world. 
I may, of course, have received a wrong im- 
pression. This particular shop had its books 
arranged according to subjects. There was 
not, as generally in England and Ireland, a 
counter devoted to the latest publications, or 
a series of shelves given over to books priced 
at a shilling. In this shop all books on eco- 
nomics, for example, whether old or new, cheap 
or dear, w^ere in one place; all books on music 
in another; and so forth. The idea underlying 
the arrangement being that a customer knows 
more or less the subject he wants to read about 
and is pleased to find all books on that subject 
ready waiting for him in rows. Our idea, on 
[140] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

the other hand, that which underlies the ar- 
rangements of our shops, is that a customer 
wants, perhaps a new book, perhaps a ten-and- 
sixpenny book, perhaps a shilHng book, with- 
out minding much what the book is about. He 
is best suited by finding all the new books in 
one place, all the ten-and-sixpenny books in 
another, and all the shilling books in a third. 
I do not know which is the better plan, but 
that adopted in the Chicago shop has the effect 
of making the casual customer realize the very 
large number of books there are on every sub- 
ject. I may therefore have been deceived 
about the popularity of books on eugenics in 
Chicago. There may be no more on sale there 
than elsewhere. But I think there are. Of 
some of these books there were very large num- 
bers, twenty or thirty copies of a single book 
all standing in a row. Plainly it was antici- 
pated that there were in Chicago twenty or 
thirty people who would want that particular 
book. I never, in any book shop elsewhere, 
saw more than five or six copies of a eugenic 
book in stock at the same time. I also no- 

[141] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

ticed that the majority of these books were 
cheap; not detailed and elaborate treatises on, 
let us say, Weissmannism and the mechanism 
of heredity; but short handbooks, statements 
of conclusions supposed to be arrived at and 
practical advice suited to plain people. I 
formed the opinion that the study of eugenics 
is popular in Chicago, more popular than else- 
where, and that a good many people believe 
that some good is to be got out of knowing 
what science has to teach on these subjects. 

I was told by a man who ought to have 
known that these books are steadily becoming 
more popular. The demand for them was 
very small five j^ears ago. It is very large 
now and becoming steadily larger. This 
seems to me a very interesting thing. For a 
long time people were content just to take 
children as they came, and they did not bother 
much about the hows and the whys of the busi- 
ness. Grown-up men and women did not in- 
deed believe that storks dropped babies down 
chimneys or that doctors brought them in 
bags. But they might just as well have be- 
[142] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

lieved these things for all the difference such 
knowledge as they had made in their way of 
conducting the business. Their philosophy 
was summed up in a proverb. "When God 
sends the mouth He sends the food to fill it." 
To go further into details struck people, 
twenty years ago, as rather a disgusting pro- 
ceeding. 

Now we have all, everywhere, grown out of 
this primitive innocence. We have been driven 
away from our old casual ways of reproducing 
ourselves, and are forced to think about what 
we are doing. There is nothing very interest- 
ing or curious about this. It is simply a rather 
unpleasant fact. What is interesting is that 
Chicago seems to be thinking more than the 
rest of us, is at all events more interested than 
the rest of us in the range of subjects which 
I have very roughly called eugenics. Chicago 
is, apparentl}^ buying more books on these 
subjects, and presumably buys them in order 
to read them. Is this a symptom of the exist- 
ence of a latent vein of weakness in Chicago? 

I am not a verj^ good judge of a question 

[143] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

of this sort. The whole subject of Eugenics 
and all the other subjects which are associated 
with it are extremely distasteful to me. I like 
to think of young men and young women fall- 
ing in love with each other and getting mar- 
ried because they are in love without consider- 
ing overmuch the almost inevitable conse- 
quences until these are forced upon them. I 
fancy that in an entirely healthy community 
things w ould be managed in this way, and that 
the result, generally speaking and taking a 
wide number of cases into consideration, would 
be a race of wholesome, sound children, fairly 
well endowed with natural powers and fitted 
to meet the struggle of life. But Chicago 
evidently thinks otherwise. The subject of 
Eugenics is studied there, and, as a conse- 
quence of the study, a number of clergy of 
various churches have declared that they will 
not marry people who are suffering from cer- 
tain diseases. They have all reason on their 
side. I admit it. I have nothing to urge 
against them except an old-fashioned preju- 
dice in favor of the fullest possible liberty to 
[144] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

the individual. Yet I cannot help feeling that 
it is not a sign of strength in a community that 
it should think very much about these things. 
A man seldom worries about his digestion or 
reads books about his stomach until his stom- 
ach and his digestion have gone wrong and 
begun to worry him. A great interest in what 
is going on in our insides is either a sign that 
things are not going on properly or else a 
deliberate invitation to our insides to give us 
trouble. It is the same with the community. 
But I should not like to think that anything 
either is or soon will be the matter with Chi- 
cago. It would be a lamentable loss to the 
world if Chicago's definite "I will" were to 
weaken, if the native hue of this magnificent, 
self-confident resolution were to be sicklied 
o'er with a pale cast of thought. 

At present, at all events, there is very little 
sign of any such disaster. It happened that 
while we were in Chicago there was some sort 
of Congress of literary men. They dined to- 
gether, of course, as all civilized men do when 
they meet to take counsel together on any sub- 

[145] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

ject except the making of laws. In all prob- 
ability laws would be better made if Parlia- 
ments were dining* clubs; but this is too wide 
a subject for me to discuss. The literary men 
who met in Chicago had a dinner, and I was 
highly honored by receiving an invitation to 
it. I wish it had been possible for me to be 
there. I could not manage it, but I did the 
next best thing, I read the report of the pro- 
ceedings in the papers on the following morn- 
ing. One speaker said that«he looked forward 
to the day when Chicago would be the world 
center of literature, music and art. He was 
not, of course, a stranger, one of the literary 
men who had gathered there from various parts 
of America. He was a citizen of Chicago. 
No stranger would have ventured to say so 
magnificent a thing. As long as Chicago says 
things like that, simply and unaffectedly, and 
believes them, Chicago can study eugenics as 
much as it likes, might even devote itself to 
Christian Science or take to Spiritualism. It 
would still remain strong and sane. For this 
was not a silly boast, made in the name of a 
[146] 



ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 

community which knows nothing of literature, 
music or art. Chicago knows perfectly well 
what literature is and what art is. Chicago 
understands what England has done in liter- 
ature and art, what France has done, what 
Germany has done. Chicago has even a very 
good idea of what Athens did. If I were to 
say that I looked forward to inventing a per- 
fect flying machine I should be a fool, because 
I know nothing whatever about flying ma- 
chines and have not the dimmest idea of what 
the difficulties of making them are. If Chi- 
cago were as ignorant about literature and art 
as I am about aeronautics, its hope of becom- 
ing the world center of these things would be 
fit matter for a comic paper. What makes 
this boast so impressive is just the fact that 
Chicago knows quite well what it means. 

There are no bounds to what a man can do 
except his own self-distrust. There is noth- 
ing beyond the reach of a city which unfalter- 
ingly believes in itself. No other city believes 
in itself quite so whole-heartedly as Chicago 
does, and I expect Chicago will be the world 

[147] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

center of literature, music and art. There is 
nothing to stop it, unless indeed Chicago itself 
gives up the idea and chooses to be something 
else instead. It may, I hope it will, decide to 
be the New Jerusalem, with gates of pearl and 
streets of gold and a tree of life growing in the 
midst of it. Then Chicago will be the New 
Jerusalem and I shall humbly sue to be ad- 
mitted as a citizen. My petition will, I am 
sure, be granted, for the hospitality of the 
people of Chicago seems to me to exceed, if 
that be possible, the hospitality of other parts 
of America. I am not sure that I should be 
altogether happy there, even under the new, 
perfected conditions of life; but perhaps I 
may. I was indeed born in Belfast, and as a 
young man shared its spirit. That gives me 
hope. But I left Belfast early in life. I have 
dwelt much among other peoples, and learned 
self-distrust. It may be too late for me to go 
back to my youth and learn confidence again. 
If it is too late, I shall not be reaUy happy in 
Chicago. 

[148]. 



CHAPTER VII 

MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

Chicago is generous as well as strong. 
There is no note of petty jealousy in its judg- 
ment of other cities. Memphis belongs to the 
South and is very different from the cities of 
the East and the middle West. It is easily 
conceivable that Chicago might be a little con- 
temptuous of Memphis, just as Belfast is 
more than a little contemptuous of Dublin. 
But Chicago displays a fine spirit. I was 
assured, more than once, when I was in Chi- 
cago, that Memphis is a good business city, 
and I suppose that no higher praise could be 
given than that. I never met a Belfast man 
who would say as much for Dublin. But, of 
course, Chicago is not in this matter so highly 
tried as Belfast is. Memphis does not assume 
an air of social superiority to Chicago as Dub- 

[149] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

lin does to Belfast. It is not therefore so very 
hard for Chicago to be generous in her judg- 
ment. 

Perhaps "generous" is the wrong word to 
use; "just" would be better. No generosity 
is required, because Memphis really is one of 
those places in which business is efficiently 
done. Timber, I understand, is one of the 
things in which Memphis deals. Cotton is 
another. I do not know which of the two is a 
greater source of trade, but cotton is the more 
impressive to the stranger. The place is full 
of cotton. Mule carts drag great bales of it 
to and from railway stations. Sternwheel 
steamers full of it ply up and down the Mis- 
sissippi. I shall never again take out a pocket 
handkerchief — I use the cheaper, not the linen 
or silken handkerchief — without looking to see 
if there is a little piece of white fluff sticking 
on my sleeve. When I next visit one of the 
vast whirling mills of Lancashire I shall think 
of a large quiet room in Memphis full of tables 
on which are laid little bundles of cotton, each 
bearing a neat ticket with mysterious numbers 
[150] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

and letters written on it. As I watch the op- 
eratives tending the huge machines which spin 
their endless threads, I shall think of the men 
who handle the samples of the cotton crop in 
that Memphis office. They take the stuff be- 
tween their fingers and thumbs and slowly pull 
it apart, looking attentively at the fine fibers 
which stretch and separate as the gentle pull is 
completed. By some exquisite sensitiveness of 
touch and some subtle skill of glance they can 
tell to within an eighth of an inch how long 
these fibers are. And on the length of the fiber 
depends to a great extent the value of the 
crop of the particular plantation from which 
that sample comes. Outside the windows of 
the room is the Mississippi, — a broad, sluggish, 
gray river when I saw it; where the deeply 
laden steamers splash their way from riverside 
plantations to Memphis and then down to New 
Orleans, where much of the cotton is shipped 
to Europe. 

Beyond the room where the cotton is graded 
is an office, a sunlit pleasant place with com- 
fortable writing desks and a case full of vari- 

[151] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

ous books. You might fancy yourself in the 
private room of some cultivated lawyer in an 
English country town, if it w^ere not that in a 
corner of that office there stands one of those 
machines which, with an infinite amount of 
fussy ticking, disgorge a steady stream of rib- 
bon stamped with figures. In New York and 
Liverpool men are shouting furiously at each 
other across the floors of Cotton Exchanges. 
Prices are made, raised, lowered by their 
shouts. Transactions involving huge sums of 
money are settled by a gesture or two and a 
shouted nimiber. A hand thrust forward, 
palm outward, sells what twenty panting 
steamers carry to the Memphis quays. A nod 
and a swiftly penciled note buys on the assur- 
ance that the men with the sensitive fingers 
have rightly judged the exact length of a fiber, 
impalpable to most of us. All the time the 
shouting and the gestures are going on thou- 
sands of miles away this machine, with de- 
tached and unexcited indifl'erence, is stamping 
a record of the frenzied bidding, there in the 
sunlit Memphis office. Chicago is no more 
[152] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

than just when it says that Memphis is a city 
where business is done. 

Modern business seems to me the most won- 
derful and romantic thing that the world has 
ever seen. A doctor in London takes a knife 
and cuts a bit out of a man's side. By doing 
that he acquires, if he chooses to exercise it, 
the right to levy a perpetual tax on the earn- 
ings of a railway somewhere in the Argentine 
Republic. No traveler on that railway knows 
of his existence. None of the engine drivers, 
porters, guards or clerks who work the railway 
have ever heard of that doctor or of the man 
whose side was cut. But of the fruit of their 
labors some portion will go to that doctor and 
to his children after him if he chooses, with 
the money his victim pays him, to buy part of 
the stock of that railway company. An ob- 
scure writer, living perhaps in some remote cor- 
ner of Wales, tells a story which catches the 
fancy of the ladies who subscribe to Mudie's 
library. He is able, because he has written 
feelingly of Evangelina's first kiss, to take to 
himself and assure to his heirs some part of the 

[153] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

steel which sweating toilers make in Pitts- 
burgh, or, if that please him better, he can 
levy a toll upon the gold dug from a mine in 
South Africa. What do the Pittsburgh steel 
workers know or care about him or Evangelina 
or the ladies who thrill over her caress? Why- 
should they give up part of the fruit of their 
toil because an imaginary man is said to have 
kissed a girl who never existed? It is very 
difficult to explain it, but all society, all na- 
tions, peoples and languages agree that they 
must. The whole force of humanity, combined 
for this purpose only, agrees that the doctor, 
because of his knife, which has very likely 
killed its victim, and the novelist because of his 
silly simpering heroine, shall have an indefeas- 
ible right to tax for their own private benefit 
almost any industry in the whole wide w^orld. 
This is an unimaginable romance. So is all 
business; but Memphis brought home the 
strangeness of it to me most compellingly. 

Here is a dainty lady, furclad, scented, pac- 
ing with delicate steps across the floor of one 
of our huge shops. In front of her, not less 
[154] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

exquisitely dressed, a handsome man bows low 
with the courtesy of a great lord of other days : 

"Lingerie, madam, this way if you please. 
The second turning to the left. This way, 
madam. Miss Jones, if you please. Madam 
wishes to see " 

And madam, with her insolent eyes, deigns 
to survey some frothy piles of frilly garments, 
touches, appraises the material, peers at the 
stitches of the hems, plucks at inserted strips of 
lace. 

Here are broad acres of black, caked earth 
and all across them are rows and rows of 
stunted bushes, like gooseberry bushes, but 
thinner and much darker. On all their prickly 
branches hang little tufts of white fluff — cot- 
ton. Among the bushes go men, women and 
children, black, negroes every one of them, 
dressed in bright yellow, bright blue and flam- 
ing red. From their shoulders hang long sacks 
which trail on the ground behind them. They 
steadily pick, pick, pick the fluff's of cotton 
out of the opened pods, and push each little bit 
into a sack. There you have the beginning of 

[155] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

all, the ending of part of this wonderful sub- 
stance which clothes, so they tell us, nine- 
tenths of the men and women in the world who 
wear clothes. What is in between the dainty 
English lady and the negro in Tennessee? 

The plantation owner drives his mule along 
winding tracks through the fields where the 
bushes are and watches. He is a man harassed 
by the unsolvable negro problem, in constant 
dread of insect pests, oppressed by economic 
difficulties. Men in mills nearby comb the 
thick seeds from the raw cotton, press it tight 
and bind it into huge bales. Men grade and sort 
the samples of it. Men shout at each other in 
great marts, buy and sell cotton yet unsorted, 
unpicked, ungrown; and the record of their 
doings is flashed across continents and oceans. 
Ships laden down to the limit of safety plunge 
through great seas with tired men on their 
bridges guiding them. In Lancashire, in 
Russia, in Austria, huge factories set their en- 
gines working and their wheels go whirling 
round. Men and women sweat at the ma- 
chines. In Derry and a thousand other places 
[156] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

women in gaunt bare rooms with sewing ma- 
chines, or in quiet chambers of French con- 
vents with needles in their hands, are working 
at long strips of cotton fabric. In shops 
women again, officered by men, are selling 
countless different stuffs made out of this 
same cotton fluff. 

And the whole complex organization, the 
last achieved result of man's age-long struggle 
for civilization, works on the perilous verge of 
breaking down. The fine lady at the one end 
of it may buy what she cannot pay for and 
disturb the delicately balanced calculations of 
the shopkeeper. Some well-intentioned Gov- 
ernment somewhere may insist that the women 
who sew shall have fire and a share of the sun- 
light, things which cost money. Inspectors 
come, with pains and penalties ready in their 
pockets, and it seems possible that they will dis- 
locate the whole machine. Labor, painfully 
organized, suddenly claims a larger share of 
the profits which are flowing in. The wheels 
of all the factories stop whirling. Their stop- 
ping affects every one through the whole 

[157] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

length of the tremendous chain, alters the man- 
ner of life in the tiniest of the negroes' huts. 
A sanguine broker may speculate disastrously 
and the long chain of the organization quivers 
through its entire length and threatens break- 
ing. A ship owner raises rates, the servants of 
a railway company go on strike. Some one 
makes a blunder in estimating the size of a 
future crop. Negroes prove less satisfactory 
than usual as workers. The possibilities of a 
breakdown somewhere are almost uncountable. 
Yet somehow the thing works. It is a won- 
derful accomplisliment of man that it should 
work and break down as seldom as it does ; but 
the dread of breakdown is present everywhere. 
Everyone, the whole way from the lady w^ho 
wants lingerie to the negro who picks at the 
bushes, is beset with anxiety. But fortunately 
no one ever really feels more than his own im- 
mediate share of it. The cotton planter will 
indeed be affected seriously by an epidemic of 
speculation in New York, or a strike in Lanca- 
shire or the legislation of some well-meaning 
government. He knows all this, but it ^oes 
[158] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

not actually trouble him much. He has his 
own particular worry and it is at him so con- 
stantly that it leaves all the other worries no 
time to get at him at all. His worry is the 
negro. 

According to the theory of the American 
constitution the negro is a free man, a brother, 
as responsible as anyone else for the due order- 
ing of the state. In actual practice the negro 
is either slowly emerging from the slave status 
or slowly sinking back to it again. It does not 
matter which way you look at it, the essential 
thing is, whichever way he is going, he is not 
j^et settled down in either position. It is im- 
possible — on account of the law — to treat him 
as a slave. It is impossible — on account of his 
nature, so I am told — to treat him as a free 
man. He is somewhere in between the two. 
He is economically difficult and socially un- 
desirable. But he is the only means yet dis- 
covered of getting cotton picked. If anyone 
would invent a machine for picking cotton he 
would benefit the world at large immensely and 
make the cotton planter, save for the fear of 

[159] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

certain insects, a happy man. But the shape of 
the cotton bush renders it very difficult to get 
the cotton off it except by the use of the human 
finger and thumb. We are not nearly so clever 
at inventing things as we think we are. The 
cotton bush has so far defeated us. The ne- 
gro, who supplies the finger and thumb, has 
very nearly defeated us too. It is hard to get 
him to work at all and still harder to keep him 
at it. He does not seem to be responsive to 
the ordinary rules of political economy. If he 
can earn enough in one day to keep him for 
three days he sees no sense in working during 
the other two. 

The southern American does not seem to be 
trying to solve this negro problem. He makes 
all sorts of makeshift arrangements, tries 
plans which may work this year and next year 
but which plainly will not work for very many 
years. These seem the best he can do. Per- 
haps they are the best anyone could do. Per- 
haps it is always wisest to be content to keep 
things going and to let the remoter future take 
care of itself. The cotton crop has to be 
[160] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

picked somehow this year, and it may have to 
be picked next year too. After that — well 
nobody speculates in futures as far ahead as 
1916. 

The problem of the social position of the 
negro seems to be quite as difficult to solve 
as that created by his indifference to the laws 
of political economy. The "man and brother" 
theory has broken down hopelessly and the 
line drawn between the white and colored parts 
of the population in the South is as well de- 
fined and distinct as any line can be. The 
stranger is told horrible tales of negro doings 
and is convinced that the white men believe 
them by the precautions they take for the pro- 
tection of women. There may be a good deal 
of exaggeration about these stories, and in any 
case the morality or immorality of the negro 
is not the most difficult element in the problem. 
Education, the steady enforcement of law, and 
the gradual pressure of civilization will no 
doubt in time render outrages rarer. It is at 
all events possible to look forward hopefully. 
The real difficulty seems to me to lie in the 

[161] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

strong", contemptuous dislike which white peo- 
ple who are brought into close contact with ne- 
groes almost invariably seem to feel for them. 
In the northern parts of America where ne- 
groes form a very small part of the population, 
this feeling does not exist. A northern Amer- 
ican or an Englishman would not feel that he 
were insulted if he were asked to sit next a 
negro at a public banquet. A southern Amer- 
ican would decline an invitation if he thought it 
likely that he would be called upon to do such a 
thing. A southern lady, who happened to be 
in New York, was offered by a polite stranger 
a seat in a street car next a negro. She indig- 
nantly refused to occupy it. The very oifer 
was an outrage. 

The feeling would be intelligible if it were 
the outcome of instinctive physical prejudice. 
An Englishwoman, who had hardly ever come 
into contact with a negro, once found herself 
seated at tea in the saloon of a steamer opposite 
a negress who was in charge of some white 
children. She found it impossible to help her- 
self to cake from the dish from which the ne- 
[162] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

gress had helped herself. The idea of doing 
so filled her with a sense of sickness. Yet she 
did not feel herself insulted or outraged at 
being placed where she was. A southern Amer- 
ican woman would have felt outraged. But 
the southern American woman has no instinc- 
tive shrinking from physical contact with black 
people. She is accustomed to it. She has at 
home a black cook who handles the food of the 
household, a black nurse who minds the chil- 
dren, perhaps a black maid who performs for 
her all sorts of intimate acts of service. As 
servants she has no objection to negroes. 
There is in her nothing corresponding to the 
Englishwoman's instinctive shrinking from the 
touch of a black hand. 

Nor is the southern American's contempt 
for the negroes anything at all analogous to 
the contempt which most people feel for those 
who are plainly their inferiors. A brave man 
has a thoroughly intelligible contempt for one 
who has shown himself to be a coward. But 
this is an entirely different thing, different in 
kind, not merely in degree, from a southern 

[163] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

white man's contempt for a negro. It is the ex- 
istence of this feehng, intensely strong and 
very difficult to explain, which makes the prob- 
lem of the negro's social future seem hopeless 
of solution. No moral or intellectual advance 
which the negro can make aiFects this feeling 
in the slightest. It is not the brutalized negro 
or the ignorant negro, but the negro, whom the 
white man refuses to recognize as a possible 
equal. 

Memphis, in spite of its negro problem, 
seems to me to be rapidly emerging from the 
ruins of one civilization and to be pressing for- 
ward to take a foremost place in another. I 
do not suppose that Memphis now regrets the 
past very much or even thinks often of the 
terrible humiliation of the Civil War and the 
years of blank hopeless min which followed it. 
There was that indeed in the past which must 
have left indelible marks behind it. It was not 
easy for a proud people, essentially aristo- 
cratic in their outlook upon life, to accept de- 
feat at the hands of men whom they looked 
down upon. It is not easy to forget the in- 
[164] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

tolerable injustice which, inevitably, I suppose, 
followed the defeat. But Memphis is looking 
forward and not back, is grasping at the pos- 
sibilities of the future rather than brooding 
over the past. 

But if Memphis and the South generally 
are content to forget the past, it does not fol- 
low that the past has forgotten them. The 
spirit of the older civilization abides. It haunts 
the new life like some pathetic ghost, doomed 
to wander helplessly among people who no 
longer want to see it. There is a certain suav- 
ity about Memphis which the stranger feels 
directly he touches the life of the place. It is 
a lingering perfume, delicate, faint but ap- 
preciable. I am told that it is to be traced to 
Europe, that the business men in Memphis 
have closer relations with England, Austria 
and Russia than with the northern states of 
their own country. I am also told that we 
must look to the origin of it to the Cavalier 
settlers of the southern states from whom the 
people who live there now claim descent. I 
do not like either explanation. A man does 

[165] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

not catch suavity by doing business with Lan- 
cashire. The quality is not one on which the 
northern Enghshman prides himself, or indeed 
which is very obvious in his way of living. The 
blood of those original cavaliers, gentlemen all 
of them I am sure, must have got a good deal 
mixed in the course of the last two hundred 
years, especially as strangers are always pour- 
ing into the South. It must be an attenuated 
fluid now, scarcely capable of flavoring per- 
ceptibly a new and vigorous life. I prefer my 
own hypothesis of a ghost. Some of these 
creatures smell of sulphur and leave a reek of it 
behind them when they pay visits to their old 
homes on earth. Others betray their presence 
by the damp, cold earthy air they bring with 
them from the tombs in which their bodies were 
laid. This Memphis ghost, which no one in 
Memphis sees, but which yet has its influence 
on Memphis life, is of quite a difl'erent kind. 
It is scented with pot-pourri, and the delicate 
rose water which great ladies of bygone gen- 
erations made and used. It is the ghost of 
some grande dame like Madame Esmond, who 
[166] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

owned slaves and used them with no misgiving 
about her right to do so, whose pride was very- 
great, whose manners were dignified, whose 
ways among those of her own caste were ex- 
ceedingly gracious. There is something, some 
lingering suggestion of great ladies about 
Memphis still, in spite of its new commercial 
prosperity. I think it must be because the 
spirits of them haunt the place. 

Someone must surely have written a book 
on the philosophy of American place names. 
The subject is an interesting one, and the world 
has a lot of authors in it. It cannot have es- 
caped them all. But I have not seen the book. 
If I ever do see it I shall turn straight to the 
chapter which deals with Memphis and Cairo, 
for I very much want to know how those two 
places came to have Egypt for their god- 
father. Most American place names are easy 
enough to understand, and they seem to me to 
surpass, in their fascinating suggestion of ro- 
mance, our older Irish and English names. It 
is, of course, interesting to know that all the 
chesters in England — Colchester, Dorchester, 

[167] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

Manchester and Chester itself — were once Ro- 
man camps; and that most of the Irish kils — 
Kilkenny, Kildare, Killaloe, Kilrush — were 
the churches of once honored saints^ But the 
Romans and the saints are very remote. They 
were important people in their day no doubt, 
but it is very hard to feel the personal touch 
of them now. American place names bring us 
closer to men with whom we feel that we can 
sympathize. There is a whole range of names 
taken straight from old homes, New York, 
for instance, Boston, New Orleans. We do 
not need to go back in search of emotions to 
the original meaning of York or to worry 
over the derivation of Orleans. It is enough 
for us that these names suggest all the pathetic 
nostalgia of exiles. The men who named these 
places must have been thinking of dearly loved 
cathedral towers, of the streets and market 
places of country towns whose every detail was 
well remembered and much regretted, of homes 
which they would scarcely hope to see again. 
It is not hard, either, to catch the spirit of the 
Puritan settlers in theological and biblical 
[168] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

names, in Philadelphia, Salem and so forth. 
The men who gave these names to their new 
homes must have felt that like Abraham they 
had gone forth from their kindred and their 
people, from the familiar Ur of the Chaldees, 
to seek a country, to find that better city whose 
builder and maker is God. Philadelphia is 
perhaps to-day no more remarkable for the 
prevalence of brotherly love among its people 
than any other city is. But there were great 
thoughts in the minds of the men who named 
it first; and reading the name to-day, even in 
a railway guide, our hearts are lifted up into 
some sort of communion with theirs. Then 
there are the Indian names, of lakes, moun- 
tains and rivers chiefly, but occasionally of 
cities too. Chicago is a city with an Indian 
name. Perhaps these are of all the most sug- 
gestive of romance. It must have been the 
hunters and explorers, pioneers of the pioneers, 
who fixed these names. One imagines these 
men, hardened with intolerable toil, skilled in 
all the lore of w41d life, brave, adventurous, 
picking up here and there a word or two of 

[169] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

Indian speech, adopting Indian names for 
places which they had no time to name them- 
selves, handing on these strange syllables to 
those who came after them to settle and to 
build. Greater, so it seems, than the romance 
of the homesick exile, greater than the ro- 
mance of the Puritan with his Bible in his 
hand, is the wild adventurousness which comes 
blown to us across the years in these Indian 
names. 

But there are names like Memphis which 
entirely baffle the imagination. It is almost 
impossible to think that the people who named 
that place were homesick for Egypt. What 
would Copts be doing on the shores of the 
JMississippi? How could they have got there? 
'Nor is it easy to think of any emotion which 
the name Memphis would be likely to stir in 
the mind of a settler. ISIemphis means noth- 
ing to most men. It is easy to see why there 
should be an American Rome. A man might 
never have been in Rome, might have no more 
than the barest smattering of its history, yet 
the name would suggest to him thoughts of 
[170] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

imperial greatness. Any one who admires im- 
perial greatness would be inclined to call a new 
city Rome. But Memphis suggests nothing 
to most of us, and to the few is associated 
only with the worship of some long forsaken 
gods. I can understand Indianapolis. There 
was Indiana to start with, a name which any- 
one with a taste for sonorous vowel sounds 
might easily make out of Indian. The Greek 
termination is natural enough. It gives a very 
desirable suggestion of classical culture to a 
scholar. But a scholar would be driven far 
afield indeed before he searched out Memphis 
for a name. 

I asked several learned and thoughtful peo- 
ple how Memphis came by its name. I got no 
answer which was really satisfactory. It was 
suggested to me that cotton grows in Egypt 
and also in the neighborhood of Memphis. 
But cotton does not immediately suggest 
Egypt to the mind. Mummies suggest Egypt. 
So, though less directly, does corn. If a cache 
of mummies had been discovered on the banks 
of the Mississippi it would be easy to account 

[m] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

for Memphis. If Tennessee were a great 
wheat state one could imagine settlers saying 
"There is corn in Egypt, according to the 
Scriptures. Let us call our new city by an 
Egyptian name." But I doubt whether cot- 
ton suggested Memphis. It certainly did not 
suggest Cairo, for Cairo is not a cotton place. 
I was told, — though without any strong con- 
viction — that the sight of the Mississippi re- 
minded somebody once of the Nile. It would 
of course remind an Egyptian fellah of the 
Nile; but the original settlers in Memphis 
were almost certainly not Egyptian fellaheen. 
Why should it remind any one else of the Nile? 
It reminds me of the Shannon, and I should 
probably have wanted to call JNIemphis Ath- 
lone if I had had a voice in the naming of it. 
It would remind an Englishman of the Severn, 
a German of the Rhine, an Austrian of the 
Danube, a Spaniard — it was, I think, a Span- 
iard who went there first — of the Guadal- 
quiver. I cannot believe that the sight of a 
very great river naturally suggests the Nile to 
[172] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

anyone who is not familiar with Egypt before- 
hand. 

It is indeed true that both the Mississippi 
and the Nile have a way of overflowing their 
banks, but most large rivers do that from time 
to time. The habit is not so peculiar as to 
force the thought of the Nile on early observ- 
ers of the Mississippi. Indeed there is a great 
difference between the overflowings of the Nile 
and those of the Mississippi. The Nile, so I 
have always understood, fertilizes the land 
round it when it overflows. The Mississippi 
destroys cotton crops when it breaks loose. 
South of Memphis for very many miles the 
river is contained by large dykes, called levees, 
a word of French origin. These are built up 
far above the level of the land which they pro- 
tect. It is a very strange thing to stand on one 
of these dykes and look down on one side at 
the roofs of the houses of the village, and on 
the other side at the river. When we were 
there the river was very low. Long banks of 
sand pushed their backs up everywhere in the 
main stream and there was half a mile of dry 

[173] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

land between the river and the bank on which 
we stood. But at flood time the river comes 
right up to the dyke, rises along the slope of 
it, and the level of the water is far above that 
of the land which the dykes protect. Then 
the people in the villages near the dyke live in 
constant fear of inundation, and I saw, be- 
side a house far inland, a boat moored — should 
I in such a case say tethered? — to a tree in a 
garden ready for use if the river swept away 
a dyke. I suppose the people get accustomed 
to living under such conditions. Men culti- 
vate vines and make excellent wine on the 
slopes of Vesuvius though Pompeii lies, a 
bleached skeleton, at their feet. I should my- 
self rather plant cotton behind a dyke, than 
do that. But I am not nearly so much afraid 
of water as I am of fire. 

I was told that at flood time men patrol the 
tops of the dykes with loaded rifles in their 
hands, ready to shoot at sight anyone who at- 
tempts to land from a boat. The idea is that 
unscrupulous people on the left bank, seeing 
that their own dyke is in danger of collapsing, 
[174] 



MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 

might try to relieve the pressure on it by dig- 
ging down a dyke on the right bank and in- 
undating the country behind it. The people 
on the other side of course take similar precau- 
tions. Most men, such unfortunately is human 
nature, would undoubtedly prefer to see their 
neighbors' houses and fields flooded rather 
than their own. But I find it difficult to be- 
lieve that anyone would be so entirely un- 
scrupulous as to dig down a protecting dyke. 
The rifle men can scarcely be really necessary 
but their existence witnesses to the greatness of 
the peril. 

I saw, while I was in Memphis, a place where 
the river had torn a large piece of land out 
of the side of a public park. The park stood 
high above the river and I looked down over 
the edge of a moderately lofty cliff at the 
marks of the river's violence. Some unex- 
pected obstacle or some unforeseen alteration 
in the river bed had sent the mighty current 
in full force against the land in this particular 
place. The result was the disappearance of a 
tract of ground and a semicircle of clay cliff 

[175] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

which looked as if it had been made with a 
gigantic cheese scoop. The river was placid 
enough when I saw it, a broad but lazy stream. 
But for the torn edge of the park I should have 
failed to realize how terrific its force can be. 
The dykes were convincing. So were the 
stories of the riflemen. But the other brought 
the reality home to me almost as well as if I 
had actually seen a flood. i 



[176] 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE LAND OF THE FREE 

We should have been hard indeed to please 
if we had not enjoyed our visits to Chicago and 
Memphis. We should be ungrateful now if 
we confessed that there was any note of dis- 
appointment in the memoiy of the joyous time 
we had. Yet there is one thing we regret about 
that journey of ours to the Middle West and 
South. We should dearly have liked to see a 
dozen other places, smaller and less important, 
which lay along the railway line between Chi- 
cago and Memphis, and between Memphis and 
Indianapolis. We made the former of these 
journeys entirely, and the latter partly, by day. 
Some unimaginative friends warned us be- 
forehand that these journeys were dull, that 
it would be better to sleep through them if pos- 
sible, rather than spend hours looking out of 

[177] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

railway carriage windows at uninteresting 
landscapes. These friends were entirely wrong. 
The journeys were anything but dull. The 
trains dragged us through a whole series of 
small towns, and, after the manner of many 
American trains, gave us ample opportunity 
of looking at the houses and the streets. 

In other countries trains are obliged to hide 
themselves as much as possible when they come 
to towns. They go into tunnels when they 
can or wander round the backs of mean houses 
so that the traveler sees nothing except patches 
of half bald earth sown with discarded tins 
and rows of shirts and stockings hanging out 
to dry. European peoples, it appears, do not 
welcome trains. In America the train seems to 
be an honored guest. It is allowed, perhaps in- 
vited, to wander along or across the chief 
streets. I have been told by a very angry 
critic that this way of stating the fact is wrong, 
misleading, and abominably unjust to the 
American people. The towns, he says, did not 
invite the train, but the train, being there first, 
so to speak, invited the towns to exist. Very 
[178] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

likely this is so. But it seems to me to matter 
but little whether the train or the town came 
first. The noticeable thing is that the town 
evidently likes the train. It is just as sure a 
mark of affection to lay out a main street 
alongside the railway line as it would be to 
invite the railway to run its line down the mid- 
dle of the main street. An English town, if it 
found that a railway was established on its 
site before it got there would angrily turn its 
back to the line, would, even at the cost of 
great inconvenience, run its streets away from 
the railway. The American plan from the 
point of view of the passenger is far better. 
He gets the most delightful glances of human 
activity and is set wondering at ways of life 
that are strange to him. 

Our imagination would, I think, have in any 
case been equal to the task of conjuring up 
mental pictures of what life is like in these 
small isolated inland towns. We should, no 
doubt, have gone grievously wrong, but w^e 
should have enjoyed ourselves even without 
guidance. Fortunately we were not left to 

[179] ' 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

our own imaginative blunderings. We had 
with us a volume of Mr. Irvin Cobb's stories 
for the possession of which we selfishly dis- 
puted. It gave us just what we wanted, a sure 
groundwork for our imaginings. We peopled 
those little towns with the men and women 
whom Mr. Cobb revealed to us. His humor 
and his delightful tenderness gave us real 
glimpses of the lives, the hopes, the fears, the 
prejudices and memories of many people who 
otherwise would have been quite strange to us. 
Each little town as we came to it was in- 
habited by friendly men and women. Thanks 
to Mr. Cobb they were our friends. All that 
was wanted was that we should be theirs. 
Hence the bitter disappointment at not being 
able to stop at one after the other of the towns, 
at being denied the chance of completing a 
friendship with people whom we already liked. 
But it may well be that we should not really 
have got to know them any better. We have 
not, alas! Mr. Cobb's gift of gentle humor or 
his power of sympathetic understanding. Also 
it takes years to get to know anyone. We 
[180] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

could not, in any case, have stayed for years in 
all these towns. Life has not years enough in 
it. 

Besides the towns there were the people we 
met on the trains. There was, for instance, a 
man who went up and down selling apples and 
grapes in little paper bags. We bought from 
him and while buying w^e heard him speak. 
There was no doubt about the matter. He was 
an Irishman, and not merely an Irishman by 
descent, the son or grandson of an emigrant, 
but one who had quite recently left Ireland. 
His voice to our ears was like well-remembered 
music. I know the feeling of joy which comes 
with landing from an English-manned steamer 
on the quay in Dublin and hearing again the 
Irish intonation and the Irish turns of phrase. 
But that is an expected pleasure. It is noth- 
ing compared to the sudden delight of hearing 
an Irish voice in some place thousands of miles 
from Ireland where the last thing you expect 
to happen is a meeting with an Irishman. I 
remember being told of an Irishwoman who 
was traveling from Singapore to Ceylon in a 

[181] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

steamer. She lay in her cabin, helplessly ill 
with some fever contracted during her stay in 
the Far East. She seemed incapable of taking 
an interest in anything until two men came to 
mend something in the corridor outside her 
cabin door. They talked together and at the 
sound of their voices the sick lady roused her- 
self. She had found something in life which 
still interested her. She wanted very much to 
know whether the men came from County An- 
trim or County Down. She was sure their 
homes were in one or the other. The Irish 
voices had stirred her. 

We were neither sick nor apathetic, but we 
were roused to fresh vitality by the sound of 
our Irish apple seller's voice. He came from 
County Wicklow. He told us so, needlessly 
indeed, for we knew it by his talk. He had 
been in America for two years, had drifted 
westward from New York, was selling apples 
in a train. Did he like America? Was he 
happy? Was he doing well? and — crucial, 
test question — would he like to go back to Ire- 
land? 

[182] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

"I would so, if there was any way I could 
get my living there." 

I suppose that is the way it is with the most 
of us. We have it fixed somehow in our minds 
that a living is easier got anywhere than at 
home. Perhaps it is. Yet surely apples might 
be sold in Ireland with as good a hope of profit 
as in Illinois or Tennessee. Baskets are cheap 
at home, and a basket is the sole outfit required 
for that trade. The apples themselves are as 
easy to come bj'^ in the one place as in the 
other. But possibly there are better openings 
in America. The profession may be over- 
crowded at home. Many professions are, 
medicine, for instance, and the law. Apple 
selling may be in the like case. At all events, 
here was an Irishman, doing fairly well by his 
own account in the middle west of America 
yet with a sincere desire to go back again to 
Ireland if only he could get a living there. 

There was another man whom we met and 
talked to with great pleasure. Our train lin- 
gered, as trains sometimes wiU, for an hour or 
more at a junction. It was waiting for an- 

[183] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

other train which ought to have met ours, but 
did not. We sat on the platform of the ob- 
servation car, and gazed at the bhnking signal 
lights, for the darkness had come. Suddenly 
a man climbed over the rail of the car and sat 
down beside us. He had, as we could see, a 
very dirty face, and very dirty hands. He wore 
clothes like those of an engine stoker. He 
was, I think, employed in shunting trains. He 
apologized for startling us and expressed the 
hope that we had not mistaken him for a mur- 
derous red Indian. He was a humorist, and he 
had seen at a glance that we were innocent 
strangers, the sort of people who might expect 
an American train to be held up by red Indians 
with scalping knives. He told us a long story 
about a lady who was walking from coach to 
coach of a train while he was engaged in 
shunting it about and was detaching some 
coaches from it. She was crossing the bridge 
between two coaches at an unlucky moment 
and found herself suddenlj^ on the line between 
two portions of the train. The expression of 
her face had greatly amused our friend. His 
[184] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

account of the incident greatly amused us. 
But the most interesting thing about this man, 
the most interesting thing to us, was his un- 
affected friendliness. In England a signal 
man or a shunter would not climb into a train, 
sit down beside a passenger and chat to him. 
A miserable consciousness of class distinction 
would render this kind of intercourse as impos- 
sible on the one side as on the other. Neither 
the passenger nor the shunter would be com- 
fortable, not even if the passenger were a Lib- 
eral politician, or a newly made Liberal peer. 
In America this sense of class distinction does 
not seem to exist. I have heard English peo- 
ple complain that Americans are disrespectful. 
I should rather use the word unrespectful, if 
such a word existed. For disrespectful seems 
to imply that respect is somehow due, and I 
do not see why it should be. I am quite pre- 
pared to sign my assent to the democratic creed 
that one man is as good as another. I even go 
further than most Democrats and say that one 
man is generally better than the other, when- 
ever it happen that I am the other. I see no 

[185] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

reason why a railway signal man should not 
talk to me or to anyone else in the friendly 
tones of an equal, provided of course that he 
does not turn out to be a bore. It is a glory 
and not a shame of American society that it 
refuses to recognize class distinction. 

My only complaint is that America has not 
gone far enough in the path of democratic 
equality. There are Americans who take tips. 
Now men neither take tips from nor give tips 
to their equals. If a friend were to slip six- 
pence into my hand when saying good-by I 
should resent it bitterly. Unless I were quite 
sure that he was either drunk or mad, I should 
feel that he was deliberately treating me as his 
inferior. I should admit that I was his inferior 
if I pocketed the tip. I should feel bound to 
touch my hat to him and say "Thank you, 
Sir," or "Much obliged to your honor." No 
man is in any way degraded by taking wages 
for the work he does, whatever that work may 
be, cleaning boots or lecturing in a University. 
But a man does lower himself when, in addi- 
tion to his wages, he accepts gifts of money 
[186] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

from strangers. He is being paid then not for 
courtesy or civility, which he ought to show in 
any case, but for serviHty ; and that no one can 
render except to a recognized superior. The 
tip in a country where class distinctions are a 
regular part of the social order is right 
enough. It is at all events a natural outcome 
of the theory that some men by reason of their 
station in life are superior to others. In a so- 
cial order which is based upon the principle of 
equality among men the tip has no proper 
place. 

The distinction between tips and wages is a 
real one, although it is sometimes obscured by 
the fact that the wages of some kinds of work 
are paid entirely or almost entirely in the form 
of tips. A waiter in a restaurant or an hotel 
lives, I believe, mainly on tips. Tips are his 
wages. Nevertheless he places himself in a 
position of inferiority by allowing himself to 
be paid in this way. It is plain that this is so. 
There is a sharp line which divides those who 
are tipped from those who are not. It may, 
for instance, be the misfortune of anyone to 

[187] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

require the services of a hospital nurse ; but we 
do not tip her however kind and attentive she 
may be. She gets her wages, her salary, a 
fixed sum. It would be insulting to oif er her, 
in addition, five shillings for herself. Hers is 
a profession which neither involves nor is sup- 
posed to involve any loss of self respect. On 
the other hand the chambermaid who makes 
the beds in an hotel is tipped. She expects it. 
And her profession, in the popular estimation 
at least, does involve a certain loss of self 
respect. The best class of young women are 
unwilling to be domestic servants, but are not 
unwilling to be hospital nurses. Yet the hos- 
pital nurse works as hard as, if not harder 
than, a housemaid. She does the same kind of 
work. There is no real difference between 
making the bed of a man who is sick and mak- 
ing the bed of a man who is well. In either 
case it is a matter of handling sheets and blan- 
kets. But a suggestion of inferiority clings 
to the profession of a housemaid and none to 
that of a hospital nurse. The reason is that 
the one woman belongs to the class which takes 
[188] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

tips, while the other belongs to the class which 
does not. 

It is easy to see that in a country like Amer- 
ica into which immigrants are continually flow- 
ing from Europe there is sure to be a large 
number of people — Italian waiters for in- 
stance, and Swedish and Irish domestic ser- 
vants — who have not yet grasped the American 
theory of social equality. They have grown 
up in countries where the theory does not pre- 
vail. They naturally and inevitably expect 
and take tips, the largesse of their recognized 
superiors. No one accustomed to European 
life grudges them their tips. But there are, 
unfortunately, many American citizens, born 
and bred in America, with the American theory 
of equality in their minds, who also take tips 
and are very much aggrieved if they do not 
get them. Yet they, by word and manner, are 
continually asserting their position of equality 
with those who tip them. This is where the 
American theory of equality between man and 
man breaks down. The driver of a taxicab 
for instance can have it one way or the other. 

[189] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

He cannot have it both. He may, like a doctor, 
a lawyer, or a plumber, take his regular fee, 
the sum marked down on the dial of his cab, 
and treat his passenger as an equal. Or he 
may take, as a tip, an extra twenty cents, in 
which case he sacrifices his equality and pro- 
claims himself the inferior of the man who tips 
him, a member of a tippable class. There 
ought to be no tippable class of American 
citizens. The English complaint of the dis- 
respectfulness of Americans is, in my opinion, 
a foolish one, unless the American expects and 
takes tips. Then the complaint is well founded 
and just. The tipper pays for respectfulness 
when he gives a tip and what he pays for he 
ought to get. 

It is, I think, quite possible that the custom 
of tipping has something to do with the dif- 
ficulty, so acute in America, of getting domes- 
tic servants. It is widely felt that domestic 
service in some way degrades the man or wom- 
an who engages in it. There is no real reason 
why it should. It is not in itself degrading 
to do things for other people, even to render 
[190] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

intimate personal service to other people. The 
dentist who fills a tooth for me does something 
for me, renders me a special kind of personal 
service. He loses no self respect by supplying 
me with a sound instrument for chewing food. 
Why should the person who cooks the food 
which that tooth will chew lose self respect by 
doing so? There is no real distinction between 
these two kinds of service. Nor is there any- 
thing in the contention that the domestic ser- 
vant is degraded by abrogating her own will 
and taking orders from someone else. Nine 
men out of ten take orders from somebody. 
From the soldier on the battlefield, the most 
honorable of men, to the clerk in a bank, we 
are almost all of us obeying orders, doing not 
what we ourselves think best or pleasantest but 
what someone in authority thinks right. What 
is the difference between obeying when you are 
told to clean a gun and obeying when you are 
told to wash a jug? The real reason why a 
suggestion of inferiority clings to the profes- 
sion of domestic service is that domestic ser- 
vants belong to the tippable class. Society 

[191] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

can, if it likes, raise domestic service to a place 
among the honorable professions, by ceasing 
to tip and paying wages which do not require 
to be supplemented by tips. If this were done 
there would be far less difficulty in keeping up 
the supply of domestic servants. 

I find myself on much more difficult ground 
when I pass on to discuss the impression made 
on me by the claim of America to be, in some 
special way, a free country. 

"To the West! to the West! to the land of 
the free." So my farmer friend sang to me 
twenty years ago. The tradition survives. 
The American citizen believes that a man is 
freer in America than he is for instance in 
England. If freedom means the power of the 
individual to do what he likes without being in- 
terfered with by laws then no man can ever 
be quite free anywhere except on a desert 
island. I, as an individual, may earnestly de- 
sire to go out into a crowded thoroughfare and 
shoot at the street cars with a revolver. I am 
not free to do this in any civilized country in 
the world. For people with desires of that 
[192] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

kind there is no such thing as liberty. The 
freedom of the individual is everywhere a com- 
promise between his personal inclination and 
the general sense of the community. Men are 
more free where the community makes fewer 
laws, less free where the community makes 
more. In England I can, if I like, buy, and 
drink at dinner, a bottle of beer in the restau- 
rant car of any train which has a restaurant 
car, in any part of the country. In certain 
states in America I cannot buy a bottle of beer 
in the restaurant car of the train. There is a 
law which stops me. It may be a very good 
law. The infringement of my liberty which 
it entails may be for my good and the good of 
society in general; but where that law exists 
I am certainly less free than where it does not 
exist. 

The tendency of modern democratic states 
is to make more and more laws and thereby to 
confine within ever narrower limits the free- 
dom of the individual man. A few years ago 
an Englishman could send his child to school 
or keep his child at home without any educa- 

[193] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

tion just as he chose. Now he must send his 
child to school. The law insists on it. The 
Irishman, in most parts of Ireland, can still, 
if he likes, allow his child to grow up without 
ever going to school. There is no law to inter- 
fere with him. In that particular respect Ire- 
land is freer than England, for England has 
gone further along the path of curtailing in- 
dividual liberty. In the matter of buying beer 
England is freer than America, because you 
can buy beer anywhere in England if you go 
to a house licensed to sell beer. In some parts 
of America there are no houses licensed to sell 
beer and you cannot buy it. America has, in 
this particular respect, gone further than Eng- 
land along the path of curtailing individual 
liberty. 

There are several other things about which 
there are laws in America which do not exist 
in England and with regard to which America 
is not so free a country as England is. But 
there are also laws in England which do not 
exist in America. The Englishman is more 
or less accustomed to his laws. He has got 
[194] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

into the habit of obeying them and they do not 
seem to interfere with his freedom. The 
American laws, to which he is not accustomed, 
strike him as unwarrantable examples of minor 
tyranny. But it is likely that the American 
is, in the same way, accustomed to his laws 
and is not irritated by them. He has got into 
the way of not wanting to buy beer in Texas, 
and does not feel that his liberty is curtailed 
by the existence of a law which it does not 
occur to him to break. He may be, on the 
other hand, profoundly annoyed by English 
laws, to which he is not accustomed. It may 
strike him, when he comes to England, that 
his liberty is being continually interfered with 
just as an Englishman feels himself continu- 
ally hampered in America. I can, for instance, 
understand that an American in England 
might feel that his liberty was most unwar- 
rantably interfered with by the law which 
obliges him to have a penny stamp on every 
check he writes. It must strike him as mon- 
strous that he cannot get his own money out 
of a bank without paying the government for 

[195] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

being allowed to do so. After all it is his 
money and the Government is not even a 
banker. Why should he pay for taking a 
sovereign from the little pile of sovereigns 
which his banker keeps for him when he would 
not have to pay for taking one out of a stock- 
ing if he adopted the old-fashioned plan of 
keeping his money there? The Englishman 
feels no annoyance at the payment of this 
penny. He is so entirely accustomed to it that 
it seems to him a violation of one of the laws 
of nature to write a check on a simple, un- 
stamped piece of paper. 

On the whole, although the citizens of both 
countries feel free enough when they are at 
home, there is probably less freedom, that is 
to say there are more laws, in America than in 
England. America is more thoroughly demo- 
cratic in constitution than England is and 
therefore less free. This seems a paradox, 
but is in reality a simple statement of obvious 
fact, nor is there any difficulty in seeing the 
reason for it. Democracies produce profes- 
sional politicians. The professional politician 
[196] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

differs from the amateur or voluntary politi- 
cian exactly as any professional differs from 
any amateur. An amateur carpenter saws 
wood and hammers nails for the fun of the 
thing, and stops sawing and hammering as 
soon as sawing and hammering cease to amuse 
him. The professional carpenter must go on 
sawing and hammering even if he does not 
want to, because it is in this way that he earns 
his bread. He therefore gets a great deal 
more salving and hanmiering done in a year 
than any amateur does. It is the same with 
politicians. The amateur politician makes a 
law now and then when he feels like it. When 
law-making ceases to interest him he goes off 
to hunt or fish. The professional politician 
must go on making laws even though the busi- 
ness has become inexpressibly wearisome. Thus 
it is that in states where there are professional 
politicians, in democratic states, there are more 
laws, and therefore less freedom, than in states 
which only have amateur politicians. Amer- 
ica, being slightly more democratic than Eng- 

[197] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

land, has slightly more laws and slightly less 
freedom. 

But it would be easy to make too much of 
this difference between England and America. 

The freedom which men value most is very 
little affected by laws. Laws neither give nor 
withhold it. Freedom is really an atmosphere 
in which we are able to breathe without anx- 
iety or fear. There are some societies in which 
a man must be constantly watching himself 
lest he should give expression to a thought or 
an opinion which is liable to offend some 
powerful interest or outrage some cherished 
conviction. All sorts of unpleasant conse- 
quences follow incautious utterance of an un- 
popular opinion, or even the discovery that 
unpopular opinions are held. It may be that 
the rash individual is looked on very coldly. 
It may be that those who seem to be his friends 
gradually draw away from him. It may be — 
this is not so unpleasant but quite unpleasant 
enough — that he is assailed in newspapers and 
held up in their columns to public odium. It 
may be that he is made to suffer in more ma- 
[198] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

terial ways, that he loses business or runs the 
risk of being deprived of some position which 
he holds. In very uncivilized communities he 
is sometimes actually treated with physical 
violence. The windows of his house are broken 
or he is mobbed. The dread of some or all of 
these penalties makes him very cautious. He 
goes through life glancing timidly from side 
to side, always anxious, always a little fright- 
ened and therefore — since fear is the real an- 
tithesis of Hberty — never free. 

All communities suffer from spasmodic fits 
of this kind of intolerance. In England in 
the year 1900 it was not safe to be a pro-Boer, 
and England at that time was not a free 
country. England is now free to quite an 
extraordinary extent. A man may hold and 
express almost any conceivable opinion with- 
out suffering for it. He can stand up in a 
public assembly and say hard things about 
England herself, point out her faults in plain 
and even bitter language. The English people 
as a whole remain totally indifferent to what 
he says about them. If the hard thing is said 

[199] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

wittily they laugh. If it is said dully they 
yawn. In neither case do they display any 
signs of anger. They succeed in giving the 
stranger in their midst the impression that 
nothing he does or says matters in the least so 
long as he avoids crossing the indefinable line 
which separates "good form" from bad. His 
manners may get him into trouble. His opin- 
ions will not. 

America is free too in this same way, but 
is not, I think, so free as England. There 
are several subjects about which it is not wise 
to talk quite freely in America. The ordinary 
middle class American, the man with whom 
one falls into casual conversation in a train, 
is sensitive about criticism of his country and 
its institutions in a way that the ordinary Eng- 
lishman is not. It may very well be that in 
this he is the Englishman's superior. A per- 
fectly detached judge of humanity, some epi- 
curean deity observing all things with passion- 
less calm and weighing all emotion in the scales 
of absolute justice — might, quite conceivably, 
rank a slightly resentful patriotism higher 
[200] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

than tolerant apathy. We Irishmen are not 
tolerant of criticism, and I sincerely hope that 
ours is the better part. We do not like the 
expression of opinions which differ from our 
own and are inclined to suppress them with 
some violence when we can. As a nation we 
value truth far more than liberty ; truth being, 
of course, the thing which we ourselves be- 
lieve; obviously that, for we would not believe 
it unless we were quite sure that it was true. 
Americans are not so whole hearted as we are 
in this matter. The more highly educated 
Americans are even inclined to drift into a tol- 
erant agnosticism which is almost English. 
But most Americans are still a little intolerant 
of strange opinions and still have enough con- 
scious patriotism to resent criticism. 

It is the fault of a great quality. No so- 
ciety can be both enthusiastic and free. It is 
the tips and the equality over again. We can 
not have things both ways. If society allows 
a man, without pain or penalty, to say exactly 
what he means, it is always because that so- 
ciety is convinced, deep down in its soul, that 

[201] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

he cannot possibly mean what he says. A man 
is free to speak what he chooses, to criticize, 
to abuse, to sneer, wherever his fellow men 
have made up their minds that it does not mat- 
ter what he says how keenly he criticizes, 
abuses or sneers. On the other hand, a society 
which is very much in earnest about anything, 
— and a great many Americans are — will not 
suffer differences of opinion patiently and will 
always be resentful of criticism. Say to an 
Englisliman that American football is superior 
to the Rugbj^ Union game. He will look at 
you with a sleepy expression in his eyes, and, 
after a short pause, politeness requiring some 
answer from him, he will say: "Is it really?" 
His tone suggests that he does not care 
whether it is or not, but that he means to go 
on playing the Rugby Union game if he plays 
at all, a point about which he has not quite 
made up his mind. Say to an American that 
Rugby Union football is superior to his game 
and he will look at you with highly alert but 
slightly troubled eyes. He wants to respect 
you if he can, and he does not like to hear you 
[202] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

saying a thing which cannot possibly be true. 
But he too is polite. 

"There may be," he says, "some points of 
superiority about the English game — but on 
the whole — think of the organization of our 
forwards. Think of the amount of thought 
required. Think of the rapid decisions which 

have to be made. Think of But come 

and see the match next Saturday and then 
you'll understand." 

There is still another kind of freedom — free- 
dom to behave as we like, freedom of man- 
ners. This is almost as important as freedom 
to speak and think without fear of conse- 
quences. Indeed, for most people it is more 
important. Only a few of us think, or want 
to say what we think. All of us have to be- 
have, to have manners of some sort either good 
or bad. It is curious to notice that, while men 
everywhere are acquiescing without much pro- 
test to the curtailment of the sort of freedom 
which is affected by law, they are steadily 
claiming and securing more and more freedom 
of manners. We are far less bound by con- 

[203] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

ventions than we used to be. There was a time 
when everybody possessed and once a week 
wore what were called "Sunday clothes." One 
hardly ever hears the phrase now, and men 
go to church in coats which would have struck 
their grandmothers as distinctly unsuited to a 
place of worship. Sunday clothes were a bond- 
age and we have broken free. There was, very 
long ago, a definite code of manners binding 
upon men and women when they met together. 
When it prevailed the intercourse between the 
sexes must have been singularly stiiF and un- 
comfortable. There were many things which 
a woman could not do without losing her char- 
acter for womanliness, and many things which 
a man could not do in the company of ladies 
— smoke, for instance. 

It is, I think, women and not men who de- 
cide how much of this sort of liberty people 
are to enjoy. If I am right about this, then 
American women are more generous than 
English women. There is much more free- 
dom in the matter of clothes in America than 
England. I remember hearing an EngHsh- 
[204] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

woman complain that no matter how she tried 
she never could succeed in dressing correctly 
in America. In England she knew exactly 
the kind of gown to wear at an afternoon 
party, at a small dinner, at a large dinner, at 
an evening reception, in the box of a theater. 
In America she perpetually found herself 
wearing the wrong thing. I imagine that in 
reality she did not wear the wrong thing, be- 
cause there is no such rigid standard of ap- 
propriateness of dress in America as there is 
in England. More latitude is allowed, and if 
a gown is hardly ever correct it is also hardly 
ever wrong. Every man who sits in the stalls 
of a London theater must display eighteen 
inches of white shirt above the top button of his 
waistcoat. In America he may wear a blue 
flannel shirt if he likes, and nobody cares 
whether it is visible beneath his tie or not. In 
England a man who dines in a very smart res- 
taurant must wear a tail coat and a white tie. 
In America he can, if he chooses, wear a tail 
coat and a black tie, or a short coat and a 

[205] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

white tie. There is no fixed rule determining 
the connection between coats and ties. 

It is not only the class of people who dine 
in smart restaurants and sit in stalls of the- 
aters which is subject to rules of this kind. 
Every class has its own conventions, and, so 
far as my observation goes, every class is a 
little freer in America than it is in England. 
No English chauffeur with any self-respect 
would consent to drive a motor car about Lon- 
don unless he were wearing some kind of uni- 
form. In America the most magnificent cars 
are frequently driven by chauffeurs in gray 
tweed suits with ordinary caps on their heads. 

I am nearly sure that it is women, the women 
of our own class, who decide what clothes we 
shall wear and what clothes they will wear 
themselves. I am quite sure that it is they 
who regulate the degree of formal stiffness 
there is to be in our intercourse with them. 
English women have to a very considerable 
extent given up requiring from men those sym- 
bols of respect which had long ago ceased to 
be anything but the mere conventional sur- 
[206] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

vivals of the medieeval idea of chivalry. Men 
and women in England meet on friendlier and 
more equal terms than they used to. Ameri- 
can women have gone even further than the 
English in setting themselves and us free from 
the old restrictions. They invite comradeship 
and have, as far as possible, swept away the 
barriers to free intercourse between sex and 
sex. 

To some people liberty of any sort, liberty 
for its own sake, will always seem a desirable 
thing. These will prefer the manners of 
America to those of England, but will cling 
to their admiration of the Englishman's toler- 
ance of criticism. There are others — it is a 
matter of temperament — who prefer restraint, 
who like to talk cautiously, who cling to social 
conventions. To them it will be a comfort to 
know that in one respect the American woman 
is not so free as her English sister. In Eng- 
land a woman may, without loss of reputation, 
smoke almost anywhere, anywhere that men 
smoke, except in the streets and the entrance 
halls of theaters. In New York there are only 

[207] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

two or three restaurants in which a woman is 
allowed to smoke. Even if she is indifferent 
to her reputation and does not mind being 
considered fast, she cannot smoke in the other 
restaurants. The head waiter comes and stops 
her if she tries. This may be quite right. I 
do not know whether it is or not. Many very 
strong arguments may be and are brought 
against women smoking. It is, I am thankful 
to say, no business of mine to weigh them 
against the other arguments which go to show 
that women are as well entitled to the solace 
of tobacco as men are. What interests me far 
more than the arguments on either side is the 
fact that American women are in this one re- 
spect much less free than English women. The 
women of both nations smoke, but the Ameri- 
can woman must do it in privacy or semi- 
privacy. The Englishwoman inhales her cig- 
arette with untroubled enjoyment in any res- 
taurant in London. She must dress herself 
strictly as convention prescribes for each oc- 
casion. She must be a little careful in her 
intercourse with men. She has not yet got a 
[208] 



THE LAND OF THE FREE 

vote. But she may smoke. The American 
woman has much more freedom in the mat- 
ter of clothes. She can be as friendly with a 
man as she likes. In several states she has 
a vote. But society in general frowns on her 
smoking and sets its policeman, the head 
waiter, to prevent her doing it. I should my- 
self prefer a cigarette to a vote ; but I am fond 
of tobacco, and all elections bore me, so I am 
not an unprejudiced judge. American women 
may be in this matter, as indeed they certainly 
are in other matters, nobler than I am. They 
may gladly sacrifice tobacco for the sake of 
the franchise, but I do not see why they should 
not have both. 



[209] 



CHAPTER IX 

WOMAN IN THE STATES 

There is a story told about Lord Beacons- 
field which, if true, goes to show that he was 
not nearly so astute a man as is generally sup- 
posed. A lady, an ardent advocate of Woman 
Suffrage, once called on him and tried to con- 
vince him of the justice of her cause. She 
was a very pretty lady and she spoke with 
great enthusiasm. One imagines flashing eyes, 
heightened color, graceful gestures of the 
hands. Lord Beaconsfield listened to her and 
looked at her. When she had finished speak- 
ing he said: "You darling!" The lady, we 
are told, was angry, thinking that she had been 
insulted. She was perfectly right. The re- 
mark, which might under other circumstances 
have been received with blushing satisfaction, 
was just then and there a piece of intolerable 
[210] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

rudeness. It was stupid besides. But per- 
haps the great statesman meant to be rude. 
Perhaps, on the other hand, he was carried 
away for the moment and ceased to be intel- 
ligent. Perhaps the whole story was invented 
by some malicious person and is entirely with- 
out foundation. In any case it is a serious 
warning to the man who sits down to write 
about American women. It makes him hesi- 
tate, fearfully, before venturing to say the 

very first thing he must want to say. But he 
who writes takes his life in his hands. I should 
be little better than a poltroon if I shrank 
from uttering the truth. 

I was asked by an able and influential edi- 
tor in New York to write an article on Amer- 
ican women. It is not every day that I am 
thus invited to write articles, so I take a par- 
donable pride in mentioning the request of 
this American editor. It was after dinner 
that he asked me, and a lady who was with us 
heard him do it. I looked at her before I an- 
swered. If she had scowled or even frowned 
I should not now be writing about American 

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FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

women. She encouraged me with a nod and a 
smile. Yet she knew — she must have known 
— what I should write first of all. Upon her 
head be at least part of the blame. She not 
merely smiled. She went on to persuade me 
to write the article. By persuading me she 
helped to make me quite certain that what I 
am writing is true. 

The American woman is singularly charm- 
ing. 

Is this an insult? I think of the many 
American women whom I met who were kind 
enough to talk to me, and I know that this 
is not what they would like to have written 
about them. Some of them were very earnest 
knights errant, who rode about redressing hu- 
man wrongs. It happens occasionally, not 
often, of course, but very occasionally, that 
women with causes are not charming. They 
are inclined to overemphasize their causes, to 
keep on hammering at a possible convert, to 
become just a little tiresome. This is, as far 
as I could judge, never the case with the Amer- 
ican ladies who have causes. Others whom I 
[212] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

met were learned and knew all about philoso- 
phies dim to me. Others again were highly 
cultured. I am an ignorant and stupid man. 
Very clever women sometimes frighten me. I 
was never frightened in America. Others 
again, without being learned or particularly 
cultured, were brilliant. They were all charm- 
ing. That is the truth. I have written it, and 
if the skies come tumbling indignantly about 
my ears they just must tumble. "Impavidum 
ferient ruince/' but I hope nothing so bad as 
that will happen to me. 

There are people in the world who believe 
that we are born again and again, rising or 
sinking in the scale of living things at each 
successive incarnation according as we behave 
ourselves well or badly in our present state. 
If this creed were true, I should try very hard 
indeed to be good, because I should want, next 
time I am born, to be an American woman. 
She seems to me to have a better kind of life 
than the woman of any other nation, or, in- 
deed, than anybody else, man or woman. She 
is, as I hope I have suggested, more free than 

[213] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

her European sister. "So full of burrs," said 
a great lady of old times, "is this work-a-day 
world, that our very petticoats will catch 
them." This is a true estimate of the position 
of the European woman. They who wear petti- 
coats over here must walk warily with chaper- 
ons beside them. But in America there are 
either fewer burrs or petticoats are made of 
some better material. The American woman, 
even when she is quite young", can go freely 
enough and no scandalous suggestions attach 
to her unless she does something very out- 
rageous. She has in other ways too a far 
better time than the English woman. Ameri- 
can social life seems to me — the word is one 
to apologize for — gynocentric. It is arranged 
with a view to the convenience and delight of 
women. Men come in where and how they 
can. The late Mr. Price Collier observed 
this, and drew from it the deduction that the 
English man tends on the whole to be more 
efficient than the American, everything in an 
English home being sacrificed to his good. 
That may or may not be true ; but I think the 
[214] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

American woman is certainly more her own 
mistress than the Englishwoman, just because 
America does its best for women and only its 
second best for men. 

I do not pretend to be superior to these 
advantages. I like a good time as well as any 
one. But I have other ambitions. And I do 
not want to be an American woman only for 
the sake of material gains. She seems to me 
to deserve her good luck because she has done 
her business in life exceedingly well, better 
on the whole than the American man has done 
his. 

I am — I wish to make this clear at once — a 
good feminist. No man is less inclined than 
I am to endorse the words of the German 
Emperor and confine woman's activities to 
"Kirche, Kiiche und Kinder." I would, if I 
had my way, give every woman a vote. I 
would invite her to discuss the most intricate 
political problems, with a full confidence that 
she could not possibly make a worse muddle 
of them than our male politicians do. I should 
like to see her conducting great businesses, 

[215] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

doctoring her neighbors, pleading for them in 
law courts, driving railway engines, and, if she 
wanted to, carrying a rifle or steering a sub- 
marine. I would place woman in every pos- 
sible way on an equality with man and confine 
her with no restriction except those with which 
she voluntarily impedes her own activities, like 
petticoats, stays, and blouses which hook up 
the back. Having made this full confession 
of faith, I shall not, I hope, be reproached 
for appearing to recognize a distinction be- 
tween woman's business in life, the thing which 
the American woman has done very well, and 
man's business, which the American man 
seems to me to have managed rather badly. 
Strictly speaking, in the ideal state all public 
affairs are women's just as much as men's. 
Strictly speaking, again in the ideal state, man 
is just as responsible as woman for the arts 
of domestic life. But we are not yet living 
in the ideal state, and for a long while now 
the household has been recognized as woman's 
sphere, while man has resented her interfer- 
[216] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

ence with anything outside the circle of social 
and family life. 

It is in these matters which have been en- 
trusted to her that the American woman has 
shown herself superior to the American man. 
I admit, of course, that the American man has 
done a great many things very brilliantly. But 
he does not seem to me to have succeeded in 
making the business of living, so far as it falls 
within his province, either comfortable or 
agreeable. The Englishman has done better. 
Examples of what I mean absolutely crowd 
upon me. Take the question of cooking food. 
The American man, left to his own devices, is 
not strikingly successful with food. The 
highest average of cooking in England is to be 
found in good men's clubs. You may, and 
often do, get excellent dinners in private 
houses in England; but you are surer of an 
excellent dinner in a first rate club. In Amer- 
ica it is the other way about. Many men's 
clubs have skilful cooks, but you are on the 
whole more likely to get very good food in a 
woman's club or in a private house than in a 

[217] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

man's club. I am not myself an expert in 
cooked food. The subject has never had a 
real fascination for me. But I have a sense 
of taste like my better educated gourmet 
brethren, and I am convinced that where the 
American woman has control of the cooking 
the business is better done than it generally is 
in England, and far better done than when it 
is left to American men. 

The kindred subjects of drinks, again, 
marks the superiority of the American woman. 
For some reason quite obscure to me, women 
are not supposed to know anything about wine. 
They either do not like it at all or they like 
bad kinds of wine. Wine is man's business in 
all countries. In America wine is dear, and 
usually of indifferent quality. Man has mis- 
managed the cellar. On the other hand, 
women are supposed — again the reason is be- 
yond me — to like eating sweets, to be special- 
ists in that whole range of food which in 
America goes under the name of candies. Men 
have not created the demand for candies or 
secured the supply. They are woman's affair. 
[218] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

The consequence is that American candies are 
better than any others in the world, better even 
than the French. It is necessary to search 
New York narrowly and patiently in order to 
find a good bottle of claret. I speak on this 
matter as an outsider, for I drink but little 
claret myself; but I am assured by highly 
skilled experts that the fact is as I state it. 
On the other hand — I know this by experi- 
ence — you can satisfy your soul with an al- 
most infinite variety of chocolates without go- 
ing three hundred yards from the door of 
your hotel in New York or Philadelphia. 

The one form of alcoholic drink in which 
America surpasses the rest of the world is the 
cocktail. I have never yet seen a properly 
written history of cocktails. The subject stiU 
waits its philosopher. But I am inclined to 
think that the cocktail, the original of the 
species, Manhattan, Bronx or whatever it may 
have been, was invented by a woman. True, 
these drinks are now universally mixed by men. 
But the inspiration is unquestionably feminine. 
Formulae for the making of cocktails exist. 

[219] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

I was once asked to review a book which con- 
tained several hundred receipts for cocktails. 
But every one agrees that the formula is of 
minor importance. The cocktail depends for 
its excellence not on careful measurements, 
but on the incalculable and indescribable thing 
called personality. The most skilful phar- 
maceutical chemist, trained all his life to the 
accurate weighing of scruples and measure- 
ment of drams, might well fail as a maker of 
cocktails. He would fail if he did not possess 
an instinct for the art. Now this is charac- 
teristic of all women's work. Man reaches 
his conclusions by argument, bases his convic- 
tions on reason, and is generally wrong. 
Woman responds to emotion, follows instinct, 
and is very often right. Man is the drudging 
scientist, patient, dull. Woman is the dashing 
empiricist, inconsequential, brilliant. The 
cocktail must be hers. I shall continue, until 
strong evidence to the contrary is offered to 
me, to believe that the credit for this glory of 
American life belongs to her and not to man. 
It would, no doubt, be insulting to say that 
[220] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

part of the business of a woman, as dis- 
tinguished from a man, is to dress well and 
be agreeable. I should not dream of saying 
such a thing. But there can be no harm in 
suggesting that it is the duty of both sexes to 
do these things. There is no real reason why 
an idealist, man or woman, should not be pleas- 
ant to look at, nor is it necessary that very 
estimable people should administer snubs to 
the rest of us. It seems to me that even very 
good people are better when they have nice 
manners and pleasanter when they dress well. 
It is not, I admit, their fault when they are 
not good looking, but it is their fault if they 
do not, by means of clothes, make themselves 
as good looking as they can. There is no ex- 
cuse for the man or woman who emphasizes 
a natural ugliness. Man, I regret to say, does 
not often recognize his duty in these matters. 
Woman, generally speaking, has done her best. 
The American woman has made the very most 
of her opportunities and has succeeded both 
in looking nice and in being an agreeable com- 
panion. In the art of putting on her clothes 

[221] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

she has no superior except the Parisienne, and 
even in Paris itself it is often difficult to tell, 
without hearing her speak, whether the lady 
at the next table in a restaurant is French or 
American. I knew an English mother who 
sent her daughter to Paris for six months in 
order that the girl might learn to dress herself. 
The journey to America would have been 
longer, but once there the girl would have had 
just as good a chance of acquiring the art. I 
am very unskilful in describing clothes, and 
the finer nuances of costume are far beyond 
the power of any language at my command 
to express. But it is possible to appreciate 
effects without being able to analyze the way 
in which they are produced. The effect on 
the emotions of a symphony rendered by a 
good orchestra is almost as great for the man 
who does not know exactly what the trombones 
are doing as it is for the musician who under- 
stands that they are adding to the general 
noise by playing chromatic scales, or whatever 
it is that trombones do play. It is the same 
with clothes, I cannot name materials, or dis- 
[222] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

cuss styles in technical language, but I am 
pleasantly conscious that the American woman 
has the air of being very well dressed. 

I am not attempting to make a comparison 
between the clothes of very wealthy women 
of the leisured classes in America and those 
of women similarly placed in other countries. 
Aristocracies and plutocracies are cosmopoli- 
tan. National characteristics are to a consid- 
erable extent smoothed off them. The women 
of these classes dress almost equally well 
everywhere. The possibility of comparison 
exists only when one considers the compara- 
tively poor women of the middle and lower 
middle classes. It is these who, in America, 
have the instinct for dressing well unusually 
highly developed. Some women have this in- 
stinct. Others have not. It seems to be dis- 
tributed geographically. There are cities — no 
bribe would induce me to name one of them — 
where the women are usually badly dressed. 
You walk up and down the chief thorough- 
fares. You enter the most fashionable restau- 
rants and are oppressed by a sense of pre- 

[223] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

vailing dowdiness. It is not a question of 
money. The gowns which you see, the coats, 
the hats have obviously cost great sums. For 
half the expenditure women in other places 
look well dressed. It is not a matter of the 
skill of dressmakers and milliners. A woman 
who has not got the instinct for clothes might 
go to — I forget the man's name, but he is the 
chief costumier in Paris — might give him a 
free hand to do his best for her, and after- 
wards she would not look a bit better dressed. 
It is not, I believe, possible to explain exactly 
what she lacks. It is an extra sense, as incom- 
municable as an ear for music. A woman 
either has it or has not. The American woman 
has it. 

I know — no one knows better than I do — 
that it is a contemptible thing to take any no- 
tice of clothes. The soul is what matters. The 
body may be in rags. The mind is what counts, 
and fine feathers do not make fine birds. A 
great prophet would not be the less a great 
prophet though his finger nails were black. I 
hope we should all adore him just the same 
[224] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

even if he never washed his face or wore a 
collar. But just at first, before we got to 
know him really well, it is possible that we 
might be a little prejudiced against him if he 
looked as if he never washed. That is all I 
wish or mean to say about the American 
woman's power of dressing herself. It dis- 
arms prejudice. The stranger starts fair, so 
to speak, when he is introduced to her. In the 
case of women who cannot, or for any reason 
will not, dress themselves nicely, there are pre- 
liminary difficulties in the way of appreciating 
their real worth. 

But the best clothes in the world are no help 
when it comes to conversation, unless, indeed, 
one is able to discuss them in detail, and I am 
not. I have met exquisitely dressed women 
who were very difficult to talk to. The Amer- 
ican woman is not one of these. Besides being 
well dressed, she is a delightful talker on all 
subjects. She may or may not be profound. 
I am not profound myself, so I have no way 
of judging about that. But profoundness is 
not wanted in conversation. Its proper place 

[225] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

is in scientific books. In conversation it is 
merely a nuisance, and the American woman, 
when she is profound, has more sense than to 
show it. She talks well because she is not in 
the least shy or self-conscious. Even young 
American girls are not shy. Brought into sud- 
den contact with a middle-aged man, they treat 
him as an equal, with a frank sense of com- 
radeship. They have, apparently, no awe of 
advanced or advancing years. They do not 
pretend to think that elderly people are in any 
way their superiors, or display in the presence 
of the aged that kind of chilling aloofness 
which is called respect. I detest people who 
behave as if they respected me because I am 
older than they are. I recognize at once that 
they are hypocrites. Boys and girls must 
know, in their hearts, just as well as we do, 
that respect is due to the young from the eld- 
erly and not the other way about. The ancient 
Romans understood this: ''Maxima dehitur 
reverentia pueris" is in the Latin grammar, 
and the Latin grammar is a good authority 
[226] 



WOMAN IN THE STATES 

on all subjects connected with ancient Roman 
civilization. 

It is her power of making herself agreeable 
which is the greatest charm of the American 
woman, a greater charm than her ability in 
dressing. I am a man very little practiced in 
the art of conversation. A dinner party — a 
party of any kind, but particularly a dinner 
party — is a thing from which I shrink. I am 
always very sorry for the two women who are 
placed beside me. I know that they will have 
to make great exertions to keep up a conver- 
sation with me. I watch them suffering and 
am myself a prey to excruciating pangs of 
self-reproach. But my agony is less in Amer- 
ica than elsewhere. The American woman 
must of course suffer as much as the English- 
woman when I take her in to dinner; but she 
possesses in an extraordinary degree the art 
of not showing it. She frequently deceives 
me for several minutes at a time, making me 
think that she is actually enjoying herself. 
She is able to do this because she has an amaz- 
ing vitality and a very acute kind of intelli- 

[227] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

gence. Now, the highest compliment which a 
woman can pay to a man is to enjoy his com- 
pany. The American woman understands this 
and succeeds in pretending she is doing it. She 
is wise, too. Recognizing that even her powers 
have their limits, and that no woman, however 
vital and intelligent, can go on disguising her 
weariness for very long, she makes her din- 
ners and luncheons as short as possible, shorter 
than similar functions are in England. She 
does not attempt anything in the way of a 
long-distance contest with the heavy stupidity 
of the ordinary man. Her's is the triumph of 
the sprinter. For a short time she flashes, 
sympathizes, subtly flatters, talks with amaz- 
ing brilliance, charms. Then she escapes. 
What happens to her next I can only guess, 
but I imagine that she must be very much 
exhausted. 



[228] 



CHAPTER X 

MEN AND HUSBANDS 

Comic papers on both sides of the Atlantic 
have adopted the marriages between Ameri- 
can women and English men of the upper 
classes as a standing joke; one of those jokes 
of which the public never gets tired, whose 
infinite variety repetition does not stale. The 
fun lies in the idea of barter. The English- 
man has a title. The American woman has 
dollars. He lays a coronet at her feet. She 
hands money bags to him. Essentially the 
joke is the same on whichever side of the At- 
lantic it is made. But there is a slight differ- 
ence in the way the parts of it are emphasized. 
The tendency among American humorists is 
to dwell a little on the greed of the English- 
man, who is represented as incapable of earn- 
ing money for himself. The English jester 

[229] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

lays more stress on the American woman's de- 
sire to be called "my lady," and pokes sly fun 
at the true democrat's fondness for titles. I 
appreciate the joke thoroughly wherever it is 
made, and I invariably laugh heartily at it. 
But I decline to take it as anything more than 
a joke. It is not a precise and scientific ex- 
planation of fact. 

There are a great many marriages between 
American women of large or moderate for- 
tune and English men, or other Europeans, of 
title. That is the fact. No doubt the dollars 
are as attractive to noblemen as they are to any- 
body else. There are a number of pleasant 
things, steam yachts, for instance, which can 
be got by those who have dollars, but not by 
those who are without them. They may occa- 
sionally be the determining factor in the choice 
of a wife. But I feel sure that most English- 
men, when they marry American women, do 
so because they like them. They marry the 
woman, not the monej^ In the same way a 
title is a very pleasant thing to have. I have 
never enjoyed the sensation and never shall, 
[230] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

but I know that it must be most agreeable to 
be styled "Your Grace," or to have a coronet 
embroidered on a pocket handkerchief. But 
I do not believe that American women marry 
coronets. They marry men. The coronet 
counts, I daresay, but the man counts more. 

It is interesting to notice that, although 
there are many marriages between American 
women and Englishmen, there are compara- 
tively few marriages between English women 
and American men. If it were a mere ques- 
tion of exchanging money for titles we might 
expect English women of title to marry Amer- 
ican men. There are a great many English 
women with titles and a great many rich Amer- 
ican men. They might marry each other, but 
they do not, not, at all events, in large num- 
bers. It is true that the woman cannot, un- 
less she is a princess, give her husband a title, 
as a man can give a title to his wife. But it 
is no small thing to have a wife with a title. 
It is a pleasure well worth buying, if it is to 
be bought. But apparently it is not. The 
English woman of title prefers to marry an 

[231] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

English man, however rich Americans may be. 
The American man prefers American women, 
though none of them have titles. Exact statis- 
tics about these marriages are not available, 
but we may take the vitality of current jokes as 
an indication of what the facts are. The joke 
about the marriage between Miss Sadie K. 
Bock, daughter of the well-known dollar dic- 
tator of Capernaum, Pa., U.S.A., and the 
Viscount Fitzeffingham Plantagenet, is fresh 
and always popular. But no one ever made a 
joke about a marriage between the dollar dic- 
tator's pon and Lady Ermyntrude. There 
would be no point in that joke if it were made 
because the thing does not happen, or does not 
happen often enough to strike the popular im- 
agination. 

The truth appears to be that American 
women, apart from any question of their 
dowries, are attractive both to English and 
American men. English men, on the other 
hand, are attractive both to English and 
American women. 

I occupy in this investigation the position 
[232] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

of an unprejudiced outsider. I am neither 
English nor American, but Irish, and I can 
afford to discuss the matter without passion, 
since Irish women are admittedly more attrac- 
tive than any others in the world and Irish 
men are seldom tempted to marry outside their 
own people. A very wise English lady, one 
who has much experience of life, once said 
that young Englishmen of good position are 
lured into marrying music hall dancers, a thing 
which occasionally happens to them, because 
they find these ladies more entertaining and 
exciting than girls of their own class. I do 
not know whether this is true or not, but if it 
is it helps to explain the attractiveness of 
American women. There is always a certain 
unexpectedness about them. They are always 
stimulating and agreeable. It is much more 
difficult to account for the attractiveness of the 
English man. 

The manners of a well-bred English man 
are not superior to those of a well-bred Amer- 
ican man. Nor are they inferior. Looked at 
superficially, they are the same. As far as 

[233] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

mere conventional behavior toward women is 
concerned, there is no diiference between an 
Enghshman and an American. A well-man- 
nered Englishman rises up and opens the door 
for a woman when she leaves the room. So 
does a well-mannered American. The Eng- 
lishman hands tea, bread and butter or cake 
to a woman before he takes tea, bread and but- 
ter or cake for himself. So does the Ameri- 
can. The outward acts are identical. But 
there is a subtle difference in the spirit which 
inspires them. The English man does these 
things because he is chivalrous. His manners 
are based on the theory "Noblesse oblige." 
The woman belongs to the weaker sex, he to 
the stronger. All courtesy is therefore due to 
her. This is the theory which underlies the 
behavior of Englishmen to women. Good 
manners are a survival, one of the few sur- 
vivals, of the old idea of chivalry ; and chivalry 
was the nobly conceived homage of the strong 
to the weak, of the superior to the inferior. 
The American, performing exactly the same 
outward acts, is reverent. And reverence is 
[234] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

essentially the opposite of chivalry. It is not 
the homage of the strong to the weak, but the 
obeisance of the inferior in the presence of a 
superior. 

This difference of spirit underlies the whole 
relationship of men to women in England and 
America. It helps to explain the fact that the 
feminist movement in England is much fiercer 
than it is in America. The English feminist 
is up against chivalry and wants equality. The 
American woman, though she may claim rights, 
has no inducement to destroy reverence. 

I should be very sorry to think, I should be 
mad to say, that this difference in spirit has 
anything to do with the attractiveness of Eng- 
lishmen, considered not as temporary compan- 
ions, but as husbands. But there are, or once 
were, people who held the theory that the natu- 
ral woman — and all women are perhaps more 
or less natural — prefers as a husband the kind 
of man who asserts himself as her superior. 
"O. Henry" has a story of a woman who 
learned to respect and love her husband only 
after she had goaded him into beating her. 

[235] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

Up to that point she had despised him thor- 
oughly. Other novelists, deep students of hu- 
man nature all of them, have worked on the 
same scheme. They are quite wrong, of 
course. But if they were right they might 
quote the Englishman's invincible chivalry as 
the reason of his attractiveness; maintaining, 
cynically, that a woman prefers, in a husband, 
that kind of homage to the reverence that the 
American man continually offers her. 

The American man strikes me as more alert 
than the Englishman. If this were noticeable 
only in New York, I should attribute the alert- 
ness to the climate. The air of New York is 
extraordinarily stimulating. The stranger 
feels himself tireless, as if he could go on doing 
things of an exhausting kind all day long 
without intervals for rest. It would be small 
wonder if the natives of the place were eager 
beyond other men. But they are not more 
eager and alert than other Americans. There- 
fore we cannot blame, or thank, the climate 
for these qualities. They must depend upon 
some peculiarity of the American nerv^ous sys- 
[236] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

tern, unless indeed they are the result of liv- 
ing under the American constitution. A man 
would naturally feel it his duty to be as alert 
as he could if he felt that his country was pre- 
eminently the land of progress and that all 
the other countries in the world were more or 
less old-fashioned and effete. But wherever 
the alertness comes from it is certainly one of 
the characteristics of the American man. 

With it goes sanguineness. Every man 
who undertakes any enterprise looks at it from 
two points of view. He thinks how very nice 
life will be if the enterprise succeeds. He also 
considers how disagreeable things will become 
if, for any reason, it fails to come off. The 
Englishman, unless he is a politician, is tem- 
peramentally inclined to give full weight to 
the possibility of failure. The American 
dwells rather on the prospects of success. 
There are, of course, a great many sanguine 
Englishmen. Most Members of Parliament, 
for instance, must be extraordinarily hopeful, 
otherwise they would not go on expecting to 
get things done by voting and listening to 

[237] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

speeches. Some Americans, though not many, 
are cautious to the point of being almost pes- 
simistic. But, broadly speaking, Americans 
are more sanguine than Englishmen. That is 
why so many new faiths, and new foods, come 
from America. Only a very hopeful people 
could have invented Christian Science or ex- 
pect to be benefited by eating patent foods 
at breakfast time. That is also, I imagine, 
why Americans drink so much iced water. 
Conscious of the dangers of being too san- 
guine, they try to cool down their spirits in 
the way which is generally recognized as best 
for reducing excessive hopefulness. To pour 
cold water on anything is a proverbial expres- 
sion. The Americans pour gallons of very 
cold water down their throats, which shows 
that they are on the watch against the defects 
of their high qualities. 

With the alertness and hopefulness there 
goes, inevitably, a certain restlessness. "Bet- 
ter the devil you know than the devil you 
don't" is a proverb which appeals to the Eng- 
lish man. It could never be popular in Amer- 
[238] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

ica. The American, if he made up his mind 
to go in for the acquaintance of devils at all, 
would be inclined to try the newer kinds, not 
merely because he would be hopeful about 
them, but because he would feel sure that the 
old ones would bore him. He would never 
settle down to a monotonous cat and dog life 
with a thoroughly familiar devil. The Eng- 
lishman prefers to remain where he is unless 
the odds are in favor of a change being a 
change for the better. The American will 
make a change unless he thinks it likely to be 
a change for the worse. 

We were greatly struck while we were in 
America by the fact that there were very few 
gardens there. The season of the year, late 
autumn, was not, indeed, favorable to gardens. 
Still I think we should have recognized flower 
beds and the remains of flowers if we had 
seen them. At first we were inclined to think 
that Americans do not care for flowers; but 
we were constantly assured, on unimpeachable 
authority, that they do. And we were not 
dependent on mere assertion. We saw that 

[239] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

Americans adorn their rooms with cut flowers, 
sometimes at huge expense. They must there- 
fore like flowers. They also, we were told, 
like growing them; but as a matter of fact 
they do not grow them to anything like the 
same extent that flowers are grown in Eng- 
land or Ireland. We used to ask why people 
who like flowers and would like to grow them 
have so few gardens. We got several an- 
swers. The climate, of course, was one. But 
it is not fair to make the climate responsible 
for too many things. Besides the climate, as 
I have said before, is not the same all over 
America. It is difficult to believe that it is 
everywhere fatal to gardening. 

Another answer — a much more satisfactory 
one — was that it takes time to create a gar- 
den, and Americans do not usually stay long 
enough in one house to make it worth while to 
start gardening. It is plainly an unsatisfac- 
tory thing to inaugurate a herbaceous border 
in 1914 if you are likely to leave it early in 
1915. As for yew hedges and delights of 
that kind, no one plants them unless he has a 
[240] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

good hope that his son will be there to enjoy 
them after he has gone. The American, so 
we were told, and so of course believed, is 
always looking forward to moving into a new 
house. This is because he is alert, sanguine 
and a lover of change. The Englishman is 
inclined to settle down in one house, and it is 
very difficult to root him out of it. Therefore 
gardens are commonly possible in England and 
rarely so in America. 

We did indeed see some gardens in America, 
and they were tended with all the care which 
flower lovers display everywhere. We saw 
in them plants brought from very different 
places, round which there doubtless gathered 
all sorts of associations, whose blossoms were 
redolent with the perfume of happy memories 
as well as their own natural scents. But these 
gardens belonged to men who either through 
the necessity of their particular occupation or 
through some eccentricity of character felt 
that they were likely to remain in one place. 

Gardens are generally best loved and most 
carefully tended by women. I have known 

[241] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

men who took a real interest in plants, but for 
the most part men who spend their leisure 
hours in gardens occupy themselves in mowing 
the grass or scuffling the walks. They will 
trim the edges of flowerbeds with shears, they 
will sometimes even dig, but their hearts are 
not with the growing plants. Often they con- 
fess as much openly, saying without shame 
that mowing is capital exercise after office 
hours, or that the celery bed must be properly 
trenched if it is to come to perfection. No 
one who works in this spirit is a gardener, nor 
is a man who merely desires a tidy trimness. 
To the real gardener neatness is an unimpor- 
tant detail. It is better that a flower should 
grow in a bed with ragged edges than that it 
should wither slowly in the middle of the 
trimmest of lawns. It is women, far oftener 
than men, who possess or are possessed by the 
instinct for getting things to grow. It is 
after all a sort of mother instinct, since flowers, 
like children, only respond to those who love 
them. Probably every woman who has the 
mother instinct has the garden instinct too, and 
[242] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

most women, we may be thankful for it, are 
potentially good mothers. 

Perhaps it is the fact that he is content to 
stay still long, enough to render gardens pos- 
sible which makes the Englishman attractive 
as a husband. It is easy to understand that 
there is something very fascinating to a gar- 
den lover in the prospect of attachment to one 
particular spot. It is a great thing to feel: 
"Here I shall live until the end of living comes, 
and then my sons will live here after me. All 
the rockeries I build, all the trees I plant, all 
my pergolas and rose hedges are for delight 
in coming years, for delight still in the years 
beyond my span of living." This instinct for 
a settled home, of which a garden is the sym- 
bol, is surely stronger in woman than in any 
man. Woman is after all the stable part of 
humanity. Man fights, invents, frets, fusses 
and passes. Woman is the link between the 
generations. Man makes life possible and 
great. It is woman who continues life, hands 
it on. Her nature requires stability. She 
feels after settledness in the hope of finding it. 

[243] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

If I were a philosopher I should pursue 
these speculations and write several pages 
about men and women which it would be very- 
difficult for any one to understand. But I 
have no taste for hunting elusive thoughts 
among the shadows of vague words. I am 
content to note my little facts ; that American 
men are more restless than Englishmen, that 
there are fewer gardens in America than in 
England, that most women like gardens, and 
that there are more marriages between Ameri- 
can women and Englishmen than between 
English women and American men. 

I came across a curious example of Amer- 
ican restlessness a little while ago. There was 
a footman, very expert in his business, who 
lived and earned good wages in an English 
house. He was an ambitious footman, and, 
though his wages were good, he wanted them 
to be better still. His opportunity came to 
him. An American wanted a valet and was 
prepared to pay very large wages indeed. The 
footman offered his services, and being, as I 
said, a very good footman, he secured the va- 
[244] 



MEN AND HUSBANDS 

cant position, and the wages which were far 
beyond any he would ever have earned in 
England. At the end of two years he hap- 
pened to meet the butler under whom he had 
served in the English house. The butler con- 
gratulated him on his great wealth. The foot- 
man, now a valet, replied that there are several 
things in the world better worth having than 
money. 

"I haven't," he said, "slept a fortnight at a 
time in the same bed since I left you, and it's 
killing me." 

Now that would not have killed or gone near 
killing an American born footman, if there is 
such a thing as an American born footman. 
He would have enjoyed it, just as his master 
did; for that American, being very wealthy, 
could if he liked have slept in the same bed 
every night for a year, every night for many 
years, until indeed the bed wore out. He pre- 
ferred to vary his beds as much as possible. 
He had, no doubt, many beds which were in a 
sense his own, beds in town houses, beds in 
shooting boxes, beds in fishing lodges, beds in 

[245] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

Europe, beds which he had bought with money 
and to which he had an indefeasible title as 
proprietor. But not one of these was, as an 
Englishman would understand the words, his 
own bed. There was not one to which he came 
back after wandering as to a familiar resting 
place. They were all just couches to sleep on, 
to be occupied for a night or two, indistinguish- 
able from those which he hired in hotels. 

I am told that the English are learning the 
habit of restlessness from the Americans, as 
indeed they have learned many other things. 
If they learn it thoroughly they will, I think, 
have to give up the hope of being able to marry 
wealthy American women. Their titles will 
not purchase desirable brides for them if they 
are no longer able to offer settled homes. Ac- 
cording to a very learned German historian, it 
was the introduction of the "stahilitas loci" 
ideal into the western rules which made mon- 
asticism the popular career it was in the church. 
It is his old fondness for settling down and 
staying there which made the Englishman so 
popular as a husband. 
[246] 



CHAPTER XI 

THE OPEN DOOR 

Americans are forced by the restlessness of 
their nature to move about frequently from 
house to house, but they have arranged that 
each temporary abode is very comfortable. 
They are ahead of the English in their domes- 
tic arrangements. I pay this tribute to them 
very unwillingly, because I myself am more 
at my ease in an inconveniently arranged 
house. That is because I am accustomed to 
inconvenience. The English houses are great- 
ly superior to the Irish, therefore to go straight 
from an Irish house to an American, from 
Connaught to Chicago, is to plunge oneself 
too suddenly into strangely civilized surround- 
ings. I admire, but I fear it would be years 
before I could enjoy, an American house. I 
go to bed most contentedly in a bedroom in 

[247] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

which a single candle lights a little circle round 
it, leaving dim, fascinating spaces in which 
anything may lurk. I like when the candle is 
extinguished to see a faint glow of light from 
a fire reflected on the ceiling. I find it pleas- 
ant to remember, after I have got into bed, 
that I do not know in what part of the room 
I left the matches, that if I awake in the night 
and want the light I must go on a dangerous 
and exciting quest, feeling my way toward 
the dressing table, sweeping one thing after 
another off^ it while I pass my hand along in 
search of the matchbox. The glare of the elec- 
tric light robs bed-going of its romance. The 
convenient switch beside my hand cuts me off 
from all chance of midnight adventure. 

I like to get out of bed on a frosty morning 
and find myself in a thoroughly cold room. 
The efl'ort to do this very trying thing braces 
me for the day. I slip a hand, an arm, a foot, 
from the blankets, feel the nip of the air, draw 
them back again, go through a period of in- 
tense mental struggle, make a gallant effort, 
fling all the bedclothes from me and stand 
[248] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

shivering on the floor. I feel then that I am a 
strong, virtuous man, fit to go forth and con- 
quer. The glow of righteousness becomes even 
more delightful if I find a film of ice on the 
water of my jug and break it with the handle 
of a toothbrush. All this is denied me in an 
American house. Getting out of bed there is 
no real test of moral courage. The room is 
pleasantly warm, a sponge is soft and pliable, 
not a frozen stone. 

I like, where this is still possible, to have my 
bath in a large tin dish, shallow and flat, which 
stands in the middle of the bedroom floor with 
a mat under it. There are fine old Irish houses 
in which this delightful way of bathing still 
survives. Alas ! they are, even in Ireland, get- 
ting fewer every day. The next best thing is 
to wander down chilly corridors in search of 
the single bathroom which the house contains. 
This is, fortunately, still necessary in most 
English and nearly all Irish houses. Any one 
who is fond of the amusement of reading 
house agents' advertisements must have no- 
ticed the English economy in bathrooms. 

[249] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

"Handsome mansion, four reception rooms, 
lounge hall, billiard room, fifteen bedrooms, 
bath, hot and cold." I do not believe that 
there is a house like that in all America. Im- 
agine the excitement of living in it when all 
the fifteen bedrooms are full. It stimulates 
a man to feel, as he sallies forth with his towel 
over his arm, that any one of the other four- 
teen inhabitants may have reached the bath be- 
fore him, that thirteen people may possibly be 
waiting in a queue outside the door. To get 
into the bathroom in a house of that kind at the 
first attempt must be like holding a hand at 
bridge with four aces, four kings, four queens 
and a knave in it, a thing worth living and 
waiting for. In America all this is denied us. 
A bathroom, luxuriously arranged, adjoins 
each bedroom. Washing is made so ridicu- 
lously easy that there ceases to be any virtue 
in it. No one would say in America that 
cleanliness is next to godliness. There is no 
connection between the two things. It would 
be as sensible to say that breathing is a subor- 
dinate kind of virtue. In England a dressing 
[250] 



THE OPEN DOOK 

gown is well-nigh a necessity. I know a 
thoughtful host who provides one for his 
guests; a warm voluminous garment in which 
it is possible to go comfortably to the bath- 
room. In America a dressing gown, for a 
man, is a useless incumbrance. I dragged one 
with me, but I shall never take it again; for, 
like many other things, it is misnamed. It is 
only when one has to stop dressing that a dress- 
ing gown is any use. 

In these matters of the heating of houses 
and the arrangement of baths I prefer what 
I am accustomed to, but I know that I am 
little better than a barbarian. I might, if I 
had lived in the days when matches were first 
invented, have sighed for my flint and steel, 
but I hope I should have recognized the superi- 
ority of matches. I might, in the early days 
of railways, have wished to go on traveling in 
stage coaches, but I should have known that 
steam engines are really better things than 
horses at dragging heavy weights for long 
distances. Thus I cling to the romance of icy 
bedrooms and inconvenient baths, but I ac- 

[251] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

knowledge freely that the Americans have 
found the better way and made a step for- 
ward along the road of human progress. 

I am not, however, so obstinately conserva- 
tive as to fail in appreciating some other points 
in the American mastery of the domestic arts. 
I may long for chilly rooms and remote baths, 
but I thoroughly enjoy clean towels. Never 
have I met so many clean towels as in Amer- 
ica. The English middle-class housekeeper is 
behind her French sister in the provision of 
towels, but the American is ahead even of 
France. The American towel is indeed small, 
the bath towel particularly small; but that 
seems to me a trifling matter, hardly worth 
mentioning, when the supply is abundant. I 
would rather any day have three small apples 
than one large one, and my feeling about tow- 
els is the same. It is a real pleasure to find a 
row of clean ones waiting every time it becomes 
necessary to wash. It is certainly a mark of 
superior civilization to realize the importance 
of house linen in daily life. On the other 
hand, it must be admitted that the American 
[252] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

fails in the matter of sheets. What you get 
are good, very good, smooth and cool. You 
are constantly given clean ones. But they 
are not long enough. In England the sheet on 
your bed covers your feet completely and leaves 
a broad flap at the other end which you can 
turn over the blankets and tuck under your 
chin. In America you must either leave your 
feet sheetless or be content with a mere ribbon 
of linen under your chin, a narrow strip which 
will certainly wriggle away during the night. 
This may not be the fault of the American 
housekeeper. There may be some kind of linen 
drapers' trust which baffles the efforts of re- 
formers. I have heard that in one of the 
western states, where the suffrage has been 
granted to women, a law has been passed that 
all sheets must be made eighteen inches longer 
than they usually are in the other American 
states. That law is a strong proof of the ad- 
vantages to the community of allowing women 
to vote. It also seems to show that the Amer- 
ican woman, at all events, is alive to the neces- 
sity of reform in this matter of sheets, and is 

[253] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

determined to do her best to remedy a defect 
in her household management. 

The disuse of doors in those parts of the 
house which are inhabited during the daytime 
is a very interesting feature of American do- 
mestic life. The first action of an Englishman 
when he enters a room is to shut the door. His 
first duty when leaving it, if any one remains 
inside, is to shut the door. No well-trained 
servant ever leaves a door open unless specially 
requested to do so. Children, from their very 
earliest years, are taught to shut doors, and 
punished — it is one of the few things for which 
a child is systematically punished now — for 
leaving doors open. An English mother calls 
after her child as he leaves the room the single 
word "door," or, if she is a very polite and 
affectionate mother, two words, "door, dear," 
or "door, please." An American child would 
not understand a request made in this elliptical 
form. It knows of course what a door is, just 
as it knows what a wall is, but it would be 
puzzled by the mere utterance of the word, 
just as an English child would be if its mother 
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THE OPEN DOOR 

suddenly called to it, "wall," or "wall, dear," 
or "wall, please." The American child would 
wonder what its mother wanted to say about 
a door. The English child understands thor- 
oughly in the same way as we all understand 
what a dentist means when he says, "Open, 
please." It is never our favorite books, our 
tightly clenched hands, or our screwed up eyes 
which he wants us to open, always our mouths. 
The word "open" is enough for us. So the 
word "door" through a long association of 
ideas at once suggests to the English child the 
idea of shutting it. 

An Englishman is thoroughly uncomfort- 
able in a room with the door open. An Amer- 
ican's feeling about shut doors was very well 
expressed to me by a lady who had been paying 
a number of visits to friends in England. 

"English houses," she said, "always seem to 
me like hotels. When you go into them you 
see nothing except shut doors." 

If, after due apologies, you ask why Amer- 
icans have no doors between their sitting- 
rooms, or why, when they have doors, they do 

[255] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

not use them, you always get the same an- 
swer. 

"Doors," they say, "are necessary in Eng- 
land to keep out draughts, because the Eng- 
lish do not know how to heat their houses. In 
our houses all rooms and passages are kept 
up to an even temperature and we do not re- 
quire doors." 

This is an intelligible but not the real ex- 
planation of this curious difference between 
the Americans and the English. There are 
some English homes which are centrally heated 
and in which the temperature is as even, though 
rarely as high, as in American houses; but the 
Englishmen who live in them still shut doors. 
An Englishman would shut the door of the 
inner chamber of a Turkish bath if there were 
a door to shut. In summer, when the days 
are very warm, he opens all the windows he can, 
but he does not sit with the door open. Tem- 
perature has nothing to do with his fondness 
for doors. In the same way there are in Amer- 
ica some houses which are not centrally heated, 
very old-fashioned houses, but they are as 
[256] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

doorless as the others. The fact seems to be 
not that doors were disused when central heat- 
ing became common, but that central heating 
was invented so that people who disliked doors 
could be warm without them. 

I think the lady who told me that the Eng- 
lish houses seemed like hotels to her hinted 
at the real explanation. The open door is a 
symbol of hospitality. It is the expression of 
sociability of disposition. The Americans are 
hospitable and marvelously sociable. They 
naturally like to live among open doors or with 
no doors at all, so that any one can walk up 
to him and speak to him without difficulty. 
The Englishman, on the other hand, wants to 
keep other people away from him, even mem- 
bers of his own family. His dearest desire is 
to have some room of his own into which he 
can shut himself, where no one has a right to 
intrude. He calls it his "den," which means 
the lurking place of a morose and solitary ani- 
mal. Rabbits, which are sociable creatures, 
live in burrows. Bees, which have perfected 
the art of life in community, have hives. The 

[257] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

bear has its den. Every room in an old- 
fashioned English middle-class house is really 
a den, though sometimes, as in the case of the 
drawing-room, a den which is meant for the 
use of several beasts of the same kind at once. 
A change is indeed coming slowly over Eng- 
lish life in this matter. The introduction into 
the middle classes of w^hat is called by house 
agents "the lounge hall" is a departure from 
the "den" theory of domestic life. The "lounge 
hall" is properly speaking a public room. It 
is available at all hours of the day and no one 
claims it specially as his own. It is accessible 
at once to the stranger who comes into the 
house from the street. It is still rare in Eng- 
land, but where it exists it marks an approach 
toward American ideals. The term "living- 
room" only lately introduced by architects into 
descriptions of English houses is another sign 
that we are becoming more sociable than we 
were. It is not simply another name for a 
drawing-room. It stands for a new idea, an 
American idea. The drawing-room — properly 
the withdrawing-room — is for the use of peo- 
[258] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

pie who want to escape temporarily from fam- 
ily life. The living-room for those who live it 
to the full. 

In the American house there are no "dens." 
The American likes to feel that he is in direct 
personal contact with the members of his fam- 
ily and with his guest. It does not annoy him, 
even if he happen to be reading a book on 
economics, to feel that his wife may sit down 
beside him or his daughter walk past the back 
of his chair humming a tune without his having 
had any warning that either of them was at 
hand. The noise made by a servant collecting 
knives and plates after dinner, reaching him 
through a drawn curtain, does not disturb his 
enjoyment of a cigar. The servant is to him 
a fellow human being, and the sound of her 
activities is a pleasant reminder of the com- 
radeship of man. He too has had his mo- 
ments of activity during the day. A guest in 
an American house is for the time being a 
member of the family, not a stranger who, 
however welcome he may be, does not pre- 
sume to intrude upon his host's privacy. 

[259] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

The "porch,", as it is called, a striking fea- 
ture of the American house, is another evi- 
dence of the spirit of sociability. A "porch" 
is a glorified and perfected veranda. In sum- 
mer it is a large open-air sitting-room. In 
winter it can, by a common arrangement, be 
made into a kind of sun parlor. It has its 
roof, supported by wooden posts. When the 
cold weather comes, frames, like very large 
window sashes, are fitted between the posts 
and a glass-sided room is made. It is evident 
that the life in these porches is of a very public 
kind. The passer-by, the casual wanderer 
along the road outside, sees the American fam- 
ily in its porch, can, if he cares to, note what 
each member of the family is doing. The 
American has no objection to this publicity. 
He is not doing anything of which he is the 
least ashamed. If other people can see him, 
he can see them in return. The arrangement 
gratifies his instinct for sociability. The Eng- 
lishman, on the other hand, hates to be seen. 
Nothing would induce him to make a habit of 
sitting in a veranda. Even in the depths of the 
[260] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

country, when his house is a long way from 
the road, he fits thin muslin curtains across the 
lower part of liis windows. These keep out a 
good deal of light and in that way are annoy- 
ing to him, but he puts up with gloom rather 
than run any risk, however small, that a 
stranger, glancing through the window, might 
actually see him. Yet the Englishman com- 
monly leads a blameless life in his own home. 
He seldom employs his leisure in any shame- 
ful practices. His casement curtains are 
simply evidences of an almost morbid love of 
privacy. 

The first thing an Englishman does when 
he builds a house is to surround it with a high 
wall. This, indeed, is not an English peculiar- 
ity. It prevails all over western Europe. It 
is a most anti-social custom and ought to be 
suppressed by law, because it robs many 
people of a great deal of innocent pleasure. 
The suburbs of Dubhn, to take an example, 
ought to be very beautiful. There are moun- 
tains to the south and hills to the west and 
north of the city, all of them lovely in out- 

[261] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

line and coloring. There is a wide and beau- 
tiful bay on the east. But the casual way- 
farer cannot see either the mountains or the 
bay. He must walk between high yellow 
walls, walls built, I suppose, round houses ; but 
we can only know this by hearsay. For the 
walls hide the houses as well as the view. In 
Sorrento, which is even more exquisitely situ- 
ated than Dublin, you walk for miles and miles 
between high walls, white in this case. The 
only difference between the view j^ou see at 
Dubhn and that which you see at Sorrento 
is that the patch of sky you see in Dublin is 
gray, at Sorrento generally blue. At Cintra, 
one of the world's most famous beauty spots, 
the walls are gray, and there you cannot even 
see the sky, because the owners of the houses 
inside the walls have planted trees and the 
branches of the trees meet over the road. The 
Americans do not build walls round their 
houses. The humblest pedestrian, going afoot 
through the suburbs of Philadelphia, Indian- 
apolis or any other city, sees not only the 
[262] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

houses but anything in the way of a view which 
lies beyond them. 

This is not because America is a republic 
and therefore democratic in spirit. Portugal 
is a republic too, having very vigorously got 
rid of its king, but the walls of Cintra are as 
high as ever. No one in the world is more 
democratic than an English Liberal, but the 
most uncompromising Liberals build walls 
round their houses as high as those of any 
Tory. The absence of walls in America is 
simply another evidence of the wonderful so- 
ciability of the people. Walls outside houses 
are like doors inside. The European likes both 
because the desire of privacy is in his blood. 
The American likes neither. 

The "Country Club" is an institution which 
could flourish only among a very sociable 
people. There are of course clubs of many 
sorts in England. There is the club proper, 
the club without qualification, which is found 
at its very best in London. In books like 
Whitaker's Almanac, which classify clubs, it 
is described as "social," but this is only in- 

[263] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

tended to distinguish it from political or sport- 
ing clubs. There is no suggestion that it is 
sociable, and in fact it is not. It is possible 
to belong to a club in London for years with- 
out knowing a dozen of your fellow members. 
It often seems as if the members of these clubs 
went to them mainly for the purpose of not 
getting to know each other; a misfortune 
which might happen to them anjrwhere else, 
but from which they are secure in their clubs. 
There are also all over England clubs specially 
devoted to particular objects, golf clubs, 
yacht clubs and so forth. In these the mem- 
bers are drawn together by their interest in a 
common pursuit, and are forced into some sort 
of acquaintanceship. But these are very dif- 
ferent in spirit and intention from the Amer- 
ican Country Club. It exists as a kind of 
center of the social life of the neighborhood. 
There may be and often are golf links con- 
nected with it. There are tennis courts, some- 
times swimming baths. There is always a ball- 
room. There are luncheon rooms, tea rooms, 
reading rooms. In connection with one such 
[264] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

club which I saw there are sailing matches for a 
one design class of boats. But neither golf 
nor tennis, dancing nor sailing, is the object 
of the club's existence. Sport is encouraged 
by these clubs for the sake of general sociabil- 
ity. In England sociability is a by-product 
of an interest in sport. 

The Country Club at Tuxedo is not per- 
haps the oldest, but it is one of the oldest in- 
stitutions of the kind in America. In connec- 
tion with it a man can enjoy almost any kind 
of recreation from a Turkish bath to a game 
of tennis, either the lawn or the far rarer or- 
iginal kind. At the proper time of year there 
are dances, and a debutante acquires, I be- 
lieve, a certain prestige by "coming out" at one 
of them. But the club exists primarily as the 
social center of Tuxedo. It is in one way 
the ideal, the perfect country club. ' It not only 
fosters, it regulates and governs the social life 
of the place. 

Tuxedo has been spoken of as a million- 
aire's colony. It is a settlement, if not of mil- 
lionaires, at all events of wealthy people. The 

[265] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

park, an immense tract of land, is owned by 
the club. Ground for building can be obtained 
only by those who are elected members of the 
club and who are prepared to spend a certain 
sum as a minimum on the building of their 
houses. In theory the place is reserved for 
people who either do or will know each other 
socially, who are approximately on the same 
level as regards wealth and who all want to 
meet each other frequently, for one purpose 
or another, in the club. In practice, certain 
difficulties necessarily arise. A man may be 
elected a member of the club and build a house. 
He may be a thoroughly desirable person, but 
in course of time he dies. His son may be 
very undesirable, or his son may sell the house 
to some one whom the club is not willing to ad- 
mit to membership. But Tuxedo society, in- 
stead of becoming, as might have been ex- 
pected, a very narrow clique, seems to be singu- 
larly broad minded and tolerant. The diffi- 
culty of preserving the character of the place 
and keeping a large society together as, in all 
its essentials, a club, is very much less than 
[266] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

might be expected. The place is extremely 
interesting to any observer of American social 
life. The club regulates everything. It runs 
a private police force for the park. It keeps 
up roads. It supplies electric light and, what 
is hardly less necessary in America, ice to all 
the houses. It levies, though I suppose with- 
out any actual legal warrant, regular rates. 
The fact that the experiment was not wrecked 
long ago on the rocks of snobbery goes to 
show that society in America is singularly fluid 
compared to that of any European country. 
That a considerable number of people should 
want to live together in such a way is a wit- 
ness to the sociability of America. No other 
country club has realized its ideal as the club 
at Tuxedo has, but every country club — and 
you find them all over America — has some- 
thing of the spirit of Tuxedo. 

Tuxedo is immensely interesting in another 
way. Nowhere else in the world, I suppose, is 
it possible to see so many different kinds of 
domestic architecture gathered together in a 
comparatively small space. A walk round the 

[267] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

shores of the lake gives you an opportunity of 
seeing houses built in the dignified and spacious 
colonial style, a happy modification of the 
English Georgian. Beside one of these, close 
to it, may be a house like that of a Mexican 
rancher, and the hill behind is crowned with a 
French chateau. There are houses which must 
have had Italian models, others which suggest 
memories of Tudor manor houses, others built 
after the fashion of Queen Anne's time. There 
are houses whose architects evidently had an 
eclectic appreciation of all the houses built 
anywhere or at any time, who had tried to em- 
body the most desirable features of very vari- 
ous styles in one building. The general effect 
of a view of Tuxedo is exceedingly bewilder- 
ing at first, but almost every house is the ex- 
pression of some individual tastes, either good 
or bad. An architect may start, apparently 
very often does start, with the idea of building 
a house with twelve rooms in it at a cost of 
four thousand pounds. Having thus settled 
size and price, he may go ahead, trusting to 
luck about the appearance. Or an arcliitect 
[268] 



THE OPEN DOOR 

may start with the idea of building a house in 
a certain style, or to express some feeling, dig- 
nity, homeliness, grandeur, or anything else. 
The architects who built the Tuxedo houses all 
seem to have gone to work on the latter plan. 
If the Tuxedo experiment in social life fails 
and the club goes into liquidation, the United 
States Government might do worse than buy 
the whole place as it stands and turn it into a 
college of domestic architecture. The stu- 
dents could, without traveling more than a 
mile or two, study every known kind of coun- 
try house. But, indeed, a college of this sort 
seems less needed in America than anywhere 
else. It is not only the insides of the houses 
which are well planned. The outsides of the 
newer houses are for the most part beautiful 
to look at. And one can see them,, there being 
no walls. 



[269] 



CHAPTER XII 

COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

The municipal elections in New York which 
resulted in the defeat of Tammany were 
fought out with great vigor in all the usual 
ways. There were speeches, bands and flags. 
The newspapers were full of the sayings of 
the different candidates, and the leader writers 
of each party seemed to be highly successful 
in cornering the speakers of the other party. 
It was shown clearly every day that orators 
shamelessly contradicted themselves, went back 
on their own principles, and must, if they had 
any respect for logic or decency, either retract 
their latest remarks or explain them. All this 
was very interesting to us. It would have been 
interesting to any one. It was particularly 
interesting to us because it was almost new to 
us. Elections are, I suppose, fought in more 
[270] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

or less the same way everywhere; but in Con- 
naught we hardly ever have elections. An in- 
dependent candidate bubbles up occasionally, 
but as a rule we are content to return to Par- 
liament the proper man, that is to say the 
man whom somebody, we never quite know 
who, says we ought to return. 

I gathered the impression that elections must 
be an exciting sport for those engaged in them. 
I do not think that the "pomp and circum- 
stance" of the business, the outward manifes- 
tations of activity, can make much difference 
to the result. Speeches, for instance, are cer- 
tainly thrilling things to make, and I can un- 
derstand how it is that orators welcome elec- 
tions as heaven sent opportunities for the ex- 
ercise of their art. But the people who listen 
to the speeches always seem to have their minds 
made up beforehand whether they agree with 
the speaker or not. They know what he is 
going to say and are prepared with hoots or 
cheers. I never heard of any one who came to 
hoot remaining to cheer. I doubt whether 
there is a single modern instance of a speech 

[271] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

having aif ected the destiny of a vote. A very 
good speech might indeed produce some effect 
if it were not that there is always an equally 
good speech made at the same time on the other 
side. Election speeches are like tug boats pull- 
ing different ways at the opposite ends of a 
large ship. They neutralize each other and 
the ship drifts gently, sideways, with the tide. 
It cannot be seriously maintained that bands 
or flags help voters to make up their minds. 
In nine cases out of ten it is impossible to tell 
for which side a band is playing, and there- 
fore unlikely that it will draw voters to one 
side rather than the other. In the tenth case, 
when the band, by selecting some particular 
tune, makes its meaning clear, the music is not 
of a quality which moves the listener to any 
feeling of gratitude to the candidate who pays 
for it. I should, I think, feel bound to vote 
for a man who gave me "joanem et circensesT 
but I should expect good bread and an attrac- 
tive circus. I should not dream of voting for 
a candidate who provided me with inferior 
music. The flags are a real addition to the 
[272] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

gaiety of city life. The ordinary elector loves 
to see them fluttering about. But the ordinary 
elector is not by any means a fool. He knows 
that the flags will be taken down very soon 
after the election is over. If any candidate 
promised to keep his flags flying as a perma- 
nent decoration of the city streets he might 
capture a few votes. But we all know that 
none of them will do anything as useful as 
that. 

Nor do I think that the editors of news- 
papers produce much efl'ect by showing up 
the inconsistencies of politicians and pinning 
them down to-day, when they are driven to 
say something quite difl"erent, to the things 
which, under stress of other circumstances, 
they said yesterday. It does not take a clever 
man, like a newspaper editor, to corner a poli- 
tician. Any fool can do that, and the per- 
formance of an obviously easy trick does not 
move an audience at all. An acrobat who 
merely hops across the stage on one leg gets 
no applause and the box office returns fall 
away. The thing is too easy. It is the man 

[273] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

who does something really hard, balances him- 
self on the end of an umbrella and juggles 
with twenty balls at once, who attracts the 
public. If a newspaper editor at an election 
time would, instead of showing up the other 
side, offer proofs that the men on his own 
side are consistent, logical and high-principled, 
he would have enormous influence with the vot- 
ers. "Any one," so the ordinary man would 
reason, "who can prove things like that about 
politicians must be amazingly clever. If he is 
amazingly clever, far cleverer than I ever hope 
to be, then there is a strong probability that 
his side is the right one. I shall vote for it." 
The ordinary man, so we ought to recollect, is 
not nearly such a fool as is generally supposed. 
He is quite capable of reasoning, and he would 
reason, I am sure, just in the way I have sug- 
gested, if he were given a chance. 

The keen interest which we took in the 
showy side of electioneering made us diligent 
readers of the newspapers. We were rewarded 
beyond our hopes. We came across, on the 
very evening of the election itself, a little para- 
[274] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

graph, tucked away in a corner, which we 
might very easily have missed if we had been 
less earnest students. In a certain district in 
New York, so this paragraph told us, there 
was a queue of voters waiting outside a poll- 
ing station. Among them was a man who was 
known to be or was suspected of being hostile 
to Tammany. It was likely that he would cast 
his vote on the other side. There were, look- 
ing thoughtfully at the queue, certain men 
described by the newspaper as "gangsters" in 
the pay of the Tammany organization. They 
seized the voter whose principles seemed to 
them objectionable and dragged him out of 
the queue, plainly in order to prevent his re- 
cording his vote. So far there was nothing of 
very special interest in the paragraph. We 
knew beforehand — even in Ireland we know 
this — that voters are a good deal influenced 
by the strength of the party machine. The 
strength is seldom displayed in its nakedly 
physical form on this side of the Atlantic, but 
it is always there and is really the determining 
force in most elections. It was the thing which 

[275] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

happened next which gave the incident its 
value. A university student who happened to 
be engaged in social work in the neighborhood 
saw what was done. He was one man and 
there were several "gangsters," but he attacked 
them at once. He was, as might be supposed, 
as he himself must surely have foreseen, 
worsted in the fray which followed. The 
gangsters, after the manner of their kind, 
mauled, beat and kicked him to such an extent 
that he had to be carried to a hospital. It did 
not appear that this university student was a 
party man, eager for the triumph of his side 
as the gangsters were for the victory of theirs. 
He seems to have acted on the simple principle 
that a man who has a right to vote ought not 
to be interfered with in the exercise of that 
right. He was on the side of justice and lib- 
erty. He was not concerned with pohtics of 
either kind. 

I do not know what happened to that stu- 
dent afterwards. I searched the papers in 
vain for any further reference to the incident. 
I wanted to know whether the voter voted in 
[276] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

the end. I wanted to know what was done to 
the gangsters. I wanted to know whether the 
student recovered from his injuries or not. I 
wanted, above all, to know whether anyone 
recognized how fine a thing that student did. 
I never discovered another paragraph about 
the incident. 

I was talking some time afterwards to an 
English friend, the friend to whom I have al- 
ready referred, who knows America very well 
and who offered to take care of me while I was 
there. I told him the story of the voter and 
the Tammany gangsters. 

"These things," he said, "happen over here. 
They are constantly happening. One gets into 
the way of not being shocked by them. But 
there always is that university student some- 
where round, when they do happen." 

It is an amazingly high tribute to the Amer- 
ican universities. If my friend is right, if 
blatant force and abominable injustice do in- 
deed find themselves faced, always and as a 
matter of course, by a university student, then 
the universities are doing a very splendid work. 

[277] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

And I am inclined to think that my friend is 
right. There is another story of the same 
kind, one of many which might be told. This 
one came to me, not in a newspaper but from 
the lips of a man who told me that he was a 
witness of what happened. 

There w^as — I forget where — a kind of set- 
tlement, half camp, half town, built in a lonely 
place for the workmen of a company which 
was conducting some mining or engineering 
enterprise. The town, if I am to call it a 
town, was owned and ruled by the company. 
The workmen were of various nationalities, 
and, taken as a whole, a rough lot. It was, no 
doubt, difficult to keep them contented, diffi- 
cult enough to keep them at all in such a place. 
It would probably be unjust to say that the 
company encouraged immorality; but the ex- 
istence of disorderly houses in the place was 
winked at. The men wanted them. The offi- 
cials of the company, we may suppose, found 
their line of least resistance in ignoring an evil 
which they may have felt they could not cure. 
After a while, during one summer vacation, 
[278] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

there came to the place a university student. 
He was not a miner or an engineer and had no 
particular business with the company. He 
was, apparently, on a kind of mission; but 
whether he was preaching Christianity or social 
reform of a general kind I was not told. He 
was the inevitable university student of my 
friend's remark. 

He found himself face to face with an evil 
thing which he at all events would not ignore. 
He made his protest. Now no man of the 
world, certainly no business man, objects to a 
proper protest, temperately made, provided the 
protester does not go too far. The man of the 
world is tolerant. He is a consistent believer 
in the policy of living and letting live. He 
recognizes that people with principles must be 
allowed to state them. It is in order to be 
stated that principles exist. But he holds that 
in common fairness he ought to be allowed to 
ignore these statements of principle. That 
was just what this university student could not 
understand. He went on protesting more and 
more forcibly until he made the officials un- 

[279] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

comfortable and the men exceedingly angry. 
It was the men, either with, or, as I hope, with- 
out the knowledge of their superiors, who first 
threatened, then beat that university student, 
beat him on the head with a sandbag and finally 
drove him from the place with a warning that 
he had better not return again. 

He did return, bringing with him certain 
officers of the law. He was a man of some 
strength of character and the recollection of 
the beating did not cause him to hesitate. Un- 
fortunately the officers of the law could not 
do much. The disorderly houses were all quite 
orderly when they appeared. They were small 
shops selling apples, matches and other inno- 
cent things. There was no evidence to be got 
that anything worse had ever gone on in them 
than the sale of apples and matches. The 
previous inhabitants of these houses were pic- 
nicking in the woods for a few days. All that 
the officers of the law were able to do was to 
conduct the university student safely out of the 
place. That was difficult enough. 

I am not sure that this story is true, for I 
[280] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

did not read it in a newspaper; but it is very- 
like several others which I heard. They may- 
all be false or very greatly exaggerated, but 
they show, at least, the existence of a popular 
myth in which the university student figures, 
always with the same kind of character. Be- 
hind every myth there is some reality. Even 
solar myths, the vaguest myths there are, lead 
back ultimately to the sun, which is indubi- 
tably there. It seems to me that whether he 
actually does these fine things or not the Amer- 
ican university student has succeeded in im- 
pressing the public with the idea that he is the 
kind of man who might do them. That in it- 
self is no small achievement. 

I wanted very much, because of the myth 
and for other reasons, to see something of 
American university life. I did see something, 
a little of it, both at Yale and Princeton. 

I have heard it said that the Englishman is 
more attached to his school than to his univer- 
sity, that in after life he will think of himself 
as belonging to Eton, to Harrow, to Winches- 
ter, rather than to Oxford or to Cambridge. 

[281] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

The school, for some reason, rather than the 
university, is regarded as "the mother" from 
whom the life of the man's soul flowed, to 
whom his affection turns. An Oxford man or 
a Cambridge man is indeed all his life long 
proud, as he very well may be, of his connec- 
tion with his university, but his school is the 
subject of his deepest feeling. Round it 
rather than the university gathers that emotion 
which for want of better words may be de- 
scribed as educational patriotism. An Irish- 
man, on the other hand, if he is a graduate of 
Dublin University, thinks more of "Trinity" 
than he does of his school. He may have been 
at one of the most famous English public 
schools, but his university, to a considerable 
extent, obliterates the memories of it. He 
thinks of himself through life as a T. C. D. 
man. 

America is like Ireland in this respect. I 
find, looking back on my memories of the 
American men whom I met most frequently, 
that I know about several of them whether they 
are Yale men, Princeton men or Harvard men. 
[282] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

I do not know about any single one of them 
what school they belonged to. I never asked 
any questions on the subject. Such informa- 
tion as I got came to me accidentally. It came 
to me without my knowing that I was getting 
it. Only afterwards did I realize that I knew 
A. to be a Yale man, B. to be a Harvard man 
and so forth. In England the information 
which comes unsought about a man concerns 
his school rather than his university. It is the 
name of his school which drops from his lips 
when he begins talking about old days. There 
are oftener books about his school than about 
his university on his shelves, photographs of 
his school on the walls of his study. 

I do not know that there is in the American 
universities any definitely planned and delib- 
erate effort to create or foster this spirit of 
patriotism. There is certainly no such eifort 
apparent in Dublin University. The spirit is 
there. That is all that can be said. It pervades 
these institutions. Only an occasional and 
more or less eccentric undergraduate escapes 
its influence. 

[283] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

The patriotism is indeed much more obvious 
and vocal in America than in Dublin. We had 
the good luck to be present at a football match 
between Yale and Colgate Universities. It 
was not a match of first-rate importance, but 
an enormous crowd of spectators gathered to 
witness it. The excitement of the supporters 
of both sides was intense. There was no pos- 
sible mistake about the fact that professors 
and undergraduates, old men who had gradu- 
ated long ago and boys who were not yet 
undergraduates, wives, mothers and sisters of 
graduates and undergraduates, were all eager- 
ly anxious about the result of the game. Yale, 
in the end, was quite unexpectedly beaten. It 
is not too much to say that a certain gloom was 
distinctly noticeable afterward everywhere in 
New Haven. It hung over people who were 
not specially interested in athletics of any kind. 
It affected the spirits of my host's parlormaid. 

Very shortly after my return home I 
watched a football match between Dubhn Uni- 
versity and Oxford. The play was just as 
keen and sportsmanlike as the play between 
[284] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

Yale and Colgate; but there was nothing like 
the same general interest in the game. There 
was a sprinkling of spectators round the 
ground, an audience which could not compare 
in size with that of Yale. They were interested 
in the game, intelligently interested. They 
applauded good play when they saw it; but 
there was nothing to correspond to the tense 
excitement which we witnessed in America. 
The game was a game. If Dublin won, well 
and good. If Oxford won, then Dublin must 
try to do better next time. No one feared de- 
feat as a disaster. No one was prepared to 
hail victory with wild enthusiasm. A stranger 
could not have gone through New Haven on 
the daj^ of the Yale and Colgate football match 
without being aware that something of great 
importance was happening. The whole towoi 
seemed to be streaming toward the football 
ground. In Dublin you might have walked 
not only through the city but through most 
parts of the college itself on the day of the 
match against Oxford and you would not have 
discovered, unless you went into the park, that 

[285] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

there was a football match. Yet the pride of 
a Dublin man in his university is as deep and 
lasting as that of any American. 

The reason of the difference is perhaps to 
be found in the fact that everything connected 
with university athletics is far more highly or- 
ganized in America than on this side of the 
Atlantic. The undergraduate spectators are 
drilled to shout together. They practice be- 
forehand songs which they sing on the occasion 
of the match for the encouragement of their 
own side. Young men with megaphones stand 
in front of closely packed rows of undergrad- 
uates. They give the signal for shouting. 
With wavings of their arms they conduct the 
yells of the crowd as musicians conduct their 
orchestras. The result is something as differ- 
ent as possible from the casual, accidental ap- 
plause of our spectators. It is the difference 
between a winter rainstorm and the shower of 
an April morning. This organized enthusiasm 
affects everyone present. Sober-looking men 
and women shout and wave little flags tumul- 
tuously. They cannot help themselves. I un- 
[286] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

derstood, after seeing that football match, why- 
it is that America produces more successful 
religious revivalists than England does. The 
Americans realize that emotion is highly infec- 
tious. They have mastered the art of spread- 
ing it. I do not know whether this is a useful 
art or not. It probably is, if the emotion is 
a genuine and worthy one; but it is not pleas- 
ant to think that one might be swept away, 
temporarily intoxicated, by the skill of some 
organizer who is engaged in propagating a 
morbid enthusiasm. However that may be, 
love for a university is a thoroughly healthy 
thing. It cannot be wrong to foster it by 
songs and shouts or even — a curious reversion 
to the totem religion of our remote ancestors^ — 
by identifying oneself with a bulldog or a 
tiger. 

I met one evening some young men who had 
graduated in Trinity College, DubHn, and 
afterwards gone over for a post-graduate 
course to a theological college connected with 
one of the American universities. We talked 

[287] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

about Dublin chiefly, but I made one inquiry 
from them about their American experience. 

"I suppose," I said, "that you have to work 
a great deal harder here than you did at 
home?" 

Their answer was given with smiling assur- 
ance. 

"Oh, dear no; nothing like so hard." 

I should like very much to have further re- 
liable information on this point. Something 
might be got, perhaps, by consulting a number 
of Rhodes scholars at Oxford. My impres- 
sion, a vague one, is that the ordinary undis- 
tinguished American undergraduate is not re- 
quired to work so hard as an undergraduate of 
the same kind is in England or Ireland. In an 
American magazine devoted to education I 
came across an article which complained that, in 
the matter of what may be called examination 
knowledge, the American undergraduate is not 
the equal of the English undergraduate. He 
does not know as much when he enters the uni- 
versity and he does not know as much when he 
leaves it. This was an American opinion. It 
[288] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

would be very interesting to have it confirmed 
or refuted. But no one, on either side of the 
Atlantic, supposes that the kind of knowledge 
which is useful in examinations is of the first 
importance. The value of a university does 
not depend upon the number of facts which 
it can drive into the heads of average men; 
but on whether it can, by means of its teaching 
and its atmosphere, get the average man into 
the habit of thinking nobly, largely and sanely. 
It seems certain that the American university 
training does have a permanent effect on the 
men who go through it, an effect like that pro- 
duced by English schools, and certainly also by 
English universities, on their students. A man 
who is, throughout life, loyal to his school or 
university has not passed through it uninflu- 
enced. It seems likely that the American uni- 
versities are succeeding in turning out very 
good citizens. The existence of what I have 
called the university student myth, the exist- 
ence of a general opinion that university men 
are likely to be found on the side of civic right- 

[289] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

eousness, is a witness to the fact that the univer- 
sities are doing their main work well. 

The little, the very little I was able to see 
of university life helped me to understand how 
the work is being done. The chapel services, 
on weekdays and Sundays, were in many ways 
strange to me and I cannot imagine that I, 
trained in other rituals, would find digestible 
the bread of life which they provide. But I 
was profoundly impressed by the reality of 
them. Here was no official tribute to a God 
conceived of as a constitutional monarch to 
whom respect and loyalty is due but whose will 
is of no very great importance, a tribute saved 
perhaps from formality by the mystic devotion 
of a few; but an effort, groping and tentative 
no doubt, to get into actual personal touch with 
a divinity conceived of as not far remote from 
common life. These chapel services — exercises 
is the better word for them — can hardly fail to 
have a profound effect upon the ordinary man. 
I have stood in the chapel of Oriel College at 
Oxford and felt that now and then men of 
the finer kind, worshiping amid the austere 
[290] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

dignity of the place, might grow to be saints, 
might see with their eyes and handle with their 
hands the mysterious Word of Life. I sat in 
the chapel at Princeton, I listened to a sermon 
at Yale, and felt that men of commoner clay 
might go out from them to face a battering 
from the fists and boots of Tammany gang- 
sters. 

It seems to me significant that Americans 
have not got the words "don" and "donnish." 
They are terms of reproach in England, but 
the verj^ fact that they are in use proves that 
they are required. They describe what exists. 
The Americans have no use for the words be- 
cause they have not got the man or the quality 
which they name. The teaching staffs of the 
American universities do not develop the quali- 
ties of the don. They do not tend to become a 
class apart with a special outlook upon life. It 
is possible to meet a professor — even a profes- 
sor of English literature — in ordinary society, 
to talk to him, to be intimate with him and not 
to discover that he is a professor. Charles 
Lamb maintained that school-mastering left an 

[291] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

indelible mark upon a man, that having school- 
mastered he never afterward was quite the 
same as other men. I had a friend once who 
boasted that he could "spot" a parson however 
he was dressed, had spotted parsons who were 
not dressed at all — in Turkish baths. I do not 
believe that the most careful student of pro- 
fessional mannerisms could detect an Amer- 
ican professor out of his lecture room. It is 
possible that this note of ordinary worldliness 
in the members of the staff of the American 
university has a beneficial effect upon the stu- 
dents. It may help to suggest the thought that 
a university course is no more than a prepara- 
tion for life, is not, as most of us thought once, 
a thing complete in itself. 

In all good universities there is a broad 
democratic spirit among the undergraduates. 
They may, and sometimes do, despise the stu- 
dents of other universities as men of inferior 
class, but they only despise those of their fel- 
low students in their own university who, 
according to the peculiar standards of youth, 
deserve contempt. In American universities 
[292] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

this democratic spirit is stronger than it is with 
us because there is greater opportunity for its 
development. There are wider differences of 
wealth — it is difficult to speak of class in 
America — among the university students there 
than here. There are no men in English or 
Irish universities earning their keep by clean- 
ing the boots and pressing the clothes of their 
better-endowed fellow students. In American 
universities there are such men and it is quite 
possible that one of them may be president of 
an important club, or captain of a team, elected 
to these posts by the very men whose boots he 
cleans. If he is fit for such honors they will be 
given him. The fact that he cleans boots will 
not stand in his way. The wisdom of medi- 
eval schoolmen made room in universities for 
poor students, sizars, servitors. The American 
universities, with their committees of employ- 
ment for students who want to earn, are doing 
the old thing in a new way; and public opinion 
among the graduates themselves approves. 

On the subject of the higher university 
education of girls American opinion is sharply 

[293] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

divided. There are people there, just as there 
are in England, who say that the whole thing 
is a mistake, that it is better for girls not to go 
to college on any terms, under any system. I 
suppose that we must call these people reac- 
tionary. There cannot be very many of them 
anywhere. It was a surprise to me to find 
any at all in America. They are not, I think, 
very influential. Among those who favor the 
higher education of girls there are many who 
believe whole-heartedly in co-education. I had 
no opportunity of seeing a co-educational col- 
lege, but I listened to a detailed description of 
the life in one from a lady who had lived it. 
According to her co-education is the one per- 
fect system yet hit upon. Its critics urge two 
curiously inconsistent objections to it. One 
man, who is a philosopher and also seemed to 
know what he was talking about, told me that 
boys and girls educated together lose the sense 
of sex mystery, which lies at the base of ro- 
mantic love and consequently do not want to 
marry. According to his theory, based upon 
a careful observation of facts, the students of 
[294] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

co-educational universities never fall in love 
with each other or with anyone else. If the 
system were widely adopted and had this effect 
upon the students everywhere, the results 
would certainly be very unfortunate. Another 
critic, equally well informed, said that the real 
objection to co-education is that the students 
do little else except fall in love with each other. 
This, though no doubt educative in a broad 
sense of the word, is not exactly the kind of 
education we send boys and girls to universities 
to get. It must be very gratifying to the 
friends of the system to feel that these two ob- 
jections cannot both be sound. 

Co-educational colleges are chiefly to be 
found in the West, among the newer states. In 
the East girls get their higher education for 
the most part in colleges of their own. Smith 
College for instance has no connection with 
any of the men's universities. Nor has Vassar 
nor Bryn MawT. These institutions have their 
own staffs, their own courses and examinations, 
their own rules, and confer their own degrees. 
Barnard College, on the other hand, is closely 

[295] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

connected with Columbia University, occupy- 
ing much the same position as Girton and St. 
Margaret's Hall do with regard to Cambridge 
and Oxford, scarcely as intimately joined to 
Columbia as Trinity Hall is to Dublin Uni- 
versity. I had the opportunity of learning 
something of the life of Smith College. I was 
immensely impressed by the spirit of the place, 
as indeed I was by that of all the girls' schools 
and colleges which I saw. There was an in- 
fectious kind of eagerness about both pupils 
and teachers. There is a feeling of hopeful- 
ness. It is as if life were looked upon as a 
great and joyful adventure in which many dis- 
coveries of good things may be expected, much 
strenuous work may be done gladly, in which 
no disillusion waits for those who are of good 
heart. Not the girls alone, but those who teach 
and guide them, are young, young in the way 
which defies the passing of years to make them 
old. We are not young because we have seen 
eighteen summers and no more, or old, because 
we have seen eighty. We are old when we have 
shut the doors of our hearts against the desire 
[296] 



COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 

of new things and steeled ourselves against 
the hope of good. We are young if we re- 
fuse, even when our heads are gray, to believe 
that disappointment inevitably waits for us. 
The world and everything in it belongs to the 
young. It is this pervading sense of youthful- 
ness which makes the American girls' colleges 
so fascinating to a stranger. It is not diffi- 
cult to believe that the girls who come out of 
them are able to take their places by the side 
of men in business life, or if the commoner 
and happier lot waits them, are well fitted to be 
the partners of men who do great things and 
the mothers of men who will do greater things 
still. 

I take it that the American universities, both 
those for men and women, are the greatest 
things in America to-day. This, curiously 
enough, is not the American idea. The ordi- 
nary American citizen is proud of every single 
thing in his country except his universities. 
He is always a little apologetic about them. 
He compares his country with England and is 
convinced that America is superior in every 

[297] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

respect, except the matter of universities. 
When he speaks of the EngHsh universities 
he shows a certain sense of reverence and makes 
mention of his own much in the spirit of 
Touchstone who introduced Audrey as "a poor 
thing, but my own." 



[298] 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

The educated American seems to have a 
great deal of affection for Ireland, but is not 
over fond of Irishmen. Our country, consid- 
ered as an Island situated on the far side of 
the Atlantic, makes a strong appeal to him. 
It is a land of thousand wrongs, a pitiful 
waif on the hard highway of the world. It 
smells strongly of poetry and music in a minor 
key, and the American is, like all good busi- 
ness men, an incurable sentimentalist. 

It is always pleasant to be loved and it is 
nice to feel that America has this aif ection for 
our poor, lost land. But the love would 
gratify us much more than it does if there 
were a little less pity mixed up in it, and if it 
were not taken for granted that we all write 
poetry. I remember meeting an American 

[299] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

lady who was quite lyrical in her appreciation 
of Ireland. She had penetrated into the coun- 
try as far as Avoca, making the trip from 
Dublin in a motor car. She stayed, so she told 
me, "in a dear old-fashioned inn in Dublin." 
She had forgotten its name, but described its 
situation to me very accurately. I could not 
possibly make a mistake about it. My heart 
was hot within me when I suggested that it 
might have been the Shelbourne Hotel at 
which she stayed. Her face lit up with a 
gleam of recognition of the name. 

"Yes," she said, "that's it, such a sweet old 
place; just Ireland all over, and really quite 
comfortable when you get used to it." 

Now the Shelbourne Hotel is our idea of a 
thoroughly up-to-date, cosmopolitan caravan- 
serai. 

Even after a visit to America and a consid- 
erable experience of American hotels, I cannot 
think of the Shelbourne Hotel as an inn, as 
old-fashioned, or as in any way Irish except 
through the accident of its situation. It evi- 
dently suggests to the American mind tender 
[300] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

thoughts of Mr. Yeats' "small cabin, of mud 
and wattles made" on Inishfree. It suggests 
no such thoughts to us. Dinner at the Shel- 
bourne Hotel costs five shillings, nothing to an 
American, of course, but a heavy price to us 
in Ireland. It consists of several courses and 
we think it quite a grand dinner. It seems to 
the American that he is at last reduced to the 
traditional Irish diet of potatoes and potheen 
whiskey. It is this way of thinking about Ire- 
land which takes the sweetness out of the 
American's genuine affection for our country. 
We do not mind admitting that we are half a 
century behind America in everj^ respect, but 
we like to think that we are making some prog- 
ress. 

An American's eyes soften when you talk to 
him about Ireland, and you feel that at any 
moment he may say "dear land," so deep is his 
sentimental pity and affection for our country. 
But his eyes harden when you mention Irish- 
men and you feel that at any moment he may 
say something very nasty about them. The 
plain fact is that Irishmen are not very popular 

[301] , 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

in America. We have, it appears, managed 
the American's municipal politics for him in 
several of his principal cities and he does not 
like it. But I am not sure that his resentment 
is quite just. Somebody must manage munici- 
pal politics everywhere. For a good many 
years the American would not manage them 
himself. He was too busy making money to 
bother himself about municipal politics. We 
took over the job — at a price. He paid the 
price with a shrug of the shoulders. I cannot 
see that he has much to complain about. Lately 
he has kicked — not against the size of the price 
— it is not the American way to higgle about 
money — but against there being any price at 
all. He has got it into his head that municipal 
politics ought to be run "free gratis and for 
nothing" by high-souled patriotic men. I sin- 
cerely hope that he will realize his ideal, though 
I doubt whether any politics anywhere can be 
run in that way. It will certainly be better for 
my fellow countrymen to earn their bread in 
any way rather than by politics. But there is 
no sense in being angry with us or abusing us. 
[302] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

We worked the machine and took our wages. 
The American watched the machine running 
and paid the wages. There was not much to 
choose between him and us. 

There is another reason why we are not as 
popular as we might be — ^as, no doubt, we 
ought to be — in America. We have remained 
Irish. One of the most wonderful things about 
America is its power of absorbing people. Men 
and women flow into it from all corners of the 
world, and in a very short time, in a couple of 
generations, become American. I have seen it 
stated that the very shapes of the skulls of im- 
migrants alter in America; that the son of an 
Italian man has an American not an Italian 
skull, even if his mother also came from Italy. 
Whether this change really takes place in the 
bones of immigrants I do not know. Quite as 
surprising a change certainly does take place in 
their nature. They cease to be foreigners and 
become American. But the Irish have never 
been thoroughly Americanized. Their Ameri- 
can citizenship becomes a great and dear thing 
to them, but they are still in some sense citizens 

[303] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

of Ireland. If a question ever arose in which 
American interests clashed with Irish interests 
there might well be a solid Irish vote in favor 
of sacrificing America to Ireland. The Irish 
are a partial exception to the rule that America 
absorbs its immigrants. It has not thoroughly 
absorbed us. 

This is the shape which the Irish problem 
has assumed in America. Here at home the 
question is, is England to govern Irishmen? 
It has obviously failed to make Englishmen 
of us. On the other side of the Atlantic the 
question is : Are Irishmen to govern America ? 
America has not succeeded in making Ameri- 
cans of all of us so far. 

So far. But the position of Irishmen in 
America is changing. There was a time when 
we took our place in the American social order 
as hewers of wood and drawers of water. We 
were the navvies, the laborers, the men who 
handled the pickaxe and spade. Now it is men 
of other races who do this work — Italians and 
Slavs. We have risen in the scale. The Irish 
emigrant who lands in New York to-day starts 
[304] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

higher up than the Irish emigrant of twenty- 
five years ago. So long as we were at the bot- 
tom of the social scale we were bound together 
by a community of interest and outlook as 
well as by nationality. We were easily organ- 
ized as a voting unit. But men, as they rise 
in the world, tend more and more to become in- 
dividuals. They have differing interests. They 
look at things in different ways. They are far 
more difficult to organize. The sense of origi- 
nal nationality will remain to us, no doubt, as 
it remains among Americans of Scottish de- 
scent. But it may cease to be an effective po- 
litical force. 

The Ulster Irishman went to America in 
large numbers before there was any great im- 
migration of southern and western Irishmen. 
He fought his way up in the social scale very 
quickly and became thoroughly Americanized. 
He has had a profound influence on American 
civilization and character. It has been the in- 
fluence of digested food, not the force exercised 
by a lump of dough swallowed hastily. But in 
time even a lump of dough is digested by a 

[305] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

healthy stomach and the gradual rise of the 
Irish in the social life of America looks like 
the beginning of the process of digestion. 

There is something else besides the change in 
his social position which will in time make it 
easier for America to absorb thoroughly the 
Irish immigrant. The Irish who went to 
America during the last half of the 19th cen- 
tury left their homes with a sense in them of 
burning wrong. They were men who hated. 
They hated England and all in Irish life which 
stood for England. This hate bound them to- 
gether. Irish political struggles, whether of 
the Fenian or the Parnell type, appealed to 
them. Ireland was, in one way or the other, 
up against England. But all this has changed. 
Irish politicians are no longer engaged in a 
struggle with England. They are in alliance 
with one set of Englishmen and only against 
another set of Englishmen. There is in Irish 
politics at home an appeal to the man of party 
feeling. He is keen enough for his own party, 
keen enough against the other party, but when 
he gets to America neither of the parties at 
[306] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

home can move him to any special enthusiasm. 
He no longer, when at home, hates England. 
He hates, if hate is not too strong a word, some 
Englishmen. There is a great difference be- 
tween hating England and hating some Eng- 
lishmen, when you are so far away that all 
Englishmen get blurred. It is easy in Ireland 
to feel that Codlin is the friend, not Short. 
It is not so easy to distinguish Codlin from 
Short, Liberal from Cunservative, when they 
are both no more than little dots, barely visible 
at a distance of three thousand miles. Codlin 
gets mixed up with Short. Some of the orig- 
inal party hatred of Short attaches to Codlin, 
no doubt. But some of the love for Codlin, 
love which is the fruit of long alliance, passes 
to Short. 

I do not mean to suggest that the sense of 
nationality has passed away from Ireland. It 
has not. In some ways the spirit of national- 
ity is stronger in Ireland to-day than it was 
at any time during the last century. It has 
certainly penetrated to classes which used to 
have no consciousness of nationality at all. 

[307] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

There are fewer Irishmen now who are ashamed 
of being Irish. There are more men now than 
ever, in every class, who want the good of Ire- 
land as distinguished from that of England 
or of any other country. But the sense of na- 
tionality has to a very large extent passed out 
of Irish political life. The platform appeal 
of the politician to the voter in Ireland now 
is far oftener an appeal to Irishmen as part 
of the British democracy than to Irishmen 
as members of a nation governed against its 
will by foreigners. The ideas of John 
O'Leary, even the ideas of Parnell, have al- 
most vanished from Irish political life. In- 
stead of them we have the idea of international 
democracy. 

This change of feeling in Ireland itself will 
make for a modification of the position of the 
Irish in America. They will tend, as the older 
generation passes, to become more American 
and less Irish. This is already felt in Ire- 
land itself. Of late years there has arisen a 
strong feeling against emigration. It is real- 
ized, as it used not to be, that Ireland loses 
[308] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

those who go. The feeling is quite new. The 
phrase "a greater Ireland beyond the seas" is 
beginning to mean a little less than it did, and 
the general consciousness of patriotic Irish- 
men at home is instinctively recognizing this. 
But it is noticeable that this dislike of emigra- 
tion has not found expression among politi- 
cians. The movement is outside politics. The 
local political boss is frequently an emigration 
agent and feels no inconsistency in his posi- 
tion. 

It would be quite easy to exaggerate the 
present value of the change I have tried to in- 
dicate. The old solidarity of the Irish in 
America remains a fact. It is to Irish friends 
and relatives that our emigrants go. It is 
among Irish people that they live when they 
settle in America. It is Irish people whom 
they marry. But the tendency is toward a 
breaking away from this national isolation. 

The movement against emigration at home 
has much in it besides the instinctive protest 
of a nation against the loss of its people. It is 
in part religious and rests on a fear that faith 

[309] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

is more easily lost in America than in Ireland. 
It is in part no doubt the result of shrinking 
of sensitive and loving souls from the horror 
of the great sorrow of farewell. 

All emotions lose their keenness with repeti- 
tion. The fine rapture of a joy is never quite so 
delightful as it was when the joy came first and 
was strange. The bitterness of sorrow and dis- 
appointment gradually loses its intensity when 
sorrow and disappointment become familiar 
things. Even insults cease after a while to move 
us to fierce anger. The law is universal; but 
there are some emotions which are only very 
slowly dulled. The sadness which comes of 
watching the departure of a train full of Irish 
emigrants is one of these. We are, or ought to 
be, well accustomed to the sight. Those of us 
who have lived long in the country parts of 
Ireland have seen these trains and traveled a 
little way in them many times ; but we are still 
saddened, hardly less saddened than when we 
saw them first. 

There is one day in the week on which emi- 
grants go, and in the west of Ireland one train 
[310] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

on that day by which they travel. It goes 
slowly, stopping at every station no matter 
how small, and at every station there is the 
same scene. The platform is crov^ded long be- 
fore the train comes in. There are many old 
women weeping without restraint, mothers 
these, or grandmothers of the boys and girls 
who are going. Their eyes are swollen. Their 
cheeks are tear-stained. Every now and then 
one of them wails aloud, and the others, catch- 
ing at the sound, wail with her, their voices 
rising and falling in a kind of weird melody 
like the ancient plain song of the church. 
There are men, too, but they are more silent. 
Very often their eyes are w^et. Their lips, 
tightly pressed, twitch spasmodically. Occa- 
sionally an uncontrollable sob breaks from one 
of them. The boys and girls who are to go 
are helplessly sorrow stricken. It is no longer 
possible for them to weep, for they have wept 
too much already. They are drooping despair- 
ingly. At their feet are carpet bags and little 
yellow tin trunks, each bearing a great flaring 
steamboat label. They wear stiff new clothes, 

[3I1J 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

shoddy tweed suits from the shop of the vil- 
lage draper, dresses and blouses long discussed 
with some country dressmaker. These pitiful 
braveries mark them out unmistakably from 
the men in muddy frieze and the women in 
wide crimson petticoats, with shawls over their 
heads, w^ho have come to say good-by. 

The train comes in. There is a rush to the 
carriage doors. Soon the windows of the car- 
riages are filled with tear-stained faces. 
Hands are stretched out, grasped, held tight. 
Final kisses are pressed on lips and cheeks. 
The guard of the train gives his signal at last. 
The engine whistles. A porter, mercifully 
brutal, by main force pushes the people back. 
The train moves slowly, gathers speed. For a 
while the whole crowd moves along the plat- 
form beside the train. Then a long sad cry 
rises, swelling to a pitch of actual agony. 
Some brave soul somewhere chokes down a sob, 
waves his hat and makes pretence to cheer. 
Then the scene is over. 

What happens next in the railway carriages? 
For a while there is sobbing or silence. Then 
[312] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

wonder and the excitement of change begin to 
take the place of grief. Words are whispered, 
questions asked. Little stores of money are 
taken out and counted over. Steamboat tickets 
are examined, unfolded, folded, put in yet 
securer places. Already the present is some- 
thing more than a dull ache ; and the future is 
looked to as well as the past. 

What happens next to the crowd which was 
left behind? In little groups the men and 
women go slowly back along the country roads 
to the houses left at dawn, go back to take up 
the work of every day. Poverty is a merciful 
mistress to those whom she holds in bondage. 
There are the fields to be dug, the cattle to 
be tended, the bread to be made. The steady 
succession of things which must be done dulls 
the edge of grief. They suffer less who are 
obliged to work as well as weep. But the sor- 
row remains. He has but a shallow knowledge 
of our people who supposes that because they 
go about the business of their lives afterward 
as they did before there is no lasting reality 
in their grief. An Irish mother will say: "I 

[313] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

had seven childer, but there's only two of them 
left to me now. I bm-ied two and three is in 
America." She classes those who have crossed 
the sea with those who are dead. Both are 
lost to her. 

Sometimes those who have gone are indeed 
lost utterly. There comes a letter once, and 
after a long interval another letter. Then no 
more letters nor any news at all. More often 
there is some kind of touch kept with the 
people at home. Letters come at Christmas 
time, often with very welcome gifts of money 
in them. There are photographs. Molly, 
whom we all knew when she was a bare-footed 
child running home from school, whom we 
remember as a half-grown girl climbing into 
her father's cart on market days, appears al- 
most a stranger in her picture. Her clothes 
are grand beyond our imagining. Her face 
has a new look in it. There are few Irish 
country houses in which such photographs are 
not shown with a mixture of pride and grief. 
It is a fine thing that Molly is so grand. It is 
a sad thing that Molly is so strange. 
[314] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

Sometimes, but not very often, a boy or girl 
comes home again, like a frightened child to a 
mother. America is too hard for some of us. 
These are beaten and return to the old poverty, 
preferring it because the ways of Irish pov- 
erty are less strenuous than the ways of Amer- 
ican success. Sometimes, but this is rare too, 
a young man or woman returns, not beaten 
but satisfied with moderate success. These 
bring with them money, the girl a marriage 
portion for herself, the man enough to restock 
his father's farm, which he looks to inlierit in 
the future. Sometimes older people come back 
to buy land, build houses and settle down. But 
these are always afterward strangers in Irish 
life. They never recapture the spirit of it. 
They have worked in America, thought in 
America, breathed in America. America has 
marked them as hers and they are ours no 
longer though they come back to us. 

Often we have passing visits from those who 
left us. The new easiness of traveling and the 
comparative comfort of the journey make 
these visits commoner than they were. Our 

[315] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

friends come back for two months or three. It 
is wonderful to see how quickly they seem to 
fall into the old ways. The young man, who 
was perhaps an insurance agent in New York, 
will fold away his city clothes and turn to with 
a loy at cutting turf. The girl, who got out 
of the train so fine to look at that her own 
father hardly dared to greet her, will be out 
next day in the fields making hay with her sis- 
ters and brothers. But there is a restlessness 
about these visitors of ours. They want us to 
do new things. They find much amiss which 
we had not noticed. They are back with us 
and glad to be back; but America is calling 
them all the time. There is very much that we 
cannot give. Soon they will go again, and any 
tears shed at the second parting are ours, not 
theirs. 

There are many histories of Ireland dealing 
sometimes with the whole, sometimes with this 
or that part of her story. They are written 
with the passion of patriots, with the bitterness 
of enemies, with the blind fury of partisans, 
with the cold justice of scientific men who 
[316] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

stand aloof. None of them are wholly satis- 
factory as histories of England are, or his- 
tories of America. No one can write a history 
of Ireland which will set forth intelligently 
Ireland's place in the world. We wait for the 
coming of some larger-minded man who will 
write the history, not of Ireland, but of the 
Irish. In one respect it is not with us as it is 
with other nations. Their stories center in 
their homes. Their conquerors go forth, but 
return again. Their thinkers live amid the 
scenes on which their eyes first opened. Their 
contributions to human knowledge are con- 
nected in all men's minds with their own lands. 
The statesmen of other nations rule their own 
people, build empires on which their own flag 
flies. The workmen of other nations, captains 
of industry or sweating laborers, make wealth 
in their home lands. It has never been so 
with us. 

Our historian when he comes and writes of 
us may take as the motto of his book Virgil's 
comment on the honey-making of the bees. 
"Sic vos non vobis." Long ago we spread the 

[317] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

gospel of the Cross over the dark places of 
Europe. The monasteries of our monks, the 
churches of our missionary preachers were 
everywhere. But our own land is still the prey 
of that acrimonious theological bitterness which 
is of all things the most utterly opposed to the 
spirit of Christ. So we, but not for ourselves, 
made sweetness. Kant is a German. Berg- 
son is a Frenchman. All the world knows it. 
Who knows or cares that John Scotus Erigena 
or Bishop Berkeley were Irish? The great- 
ness of their names has shed no luster over us. 
Our captains and soldiers have fought and 
won under every flag in Europe and under the 
Stars and Strij)es of America. Under our 
own flag they rarely fought and never won. 
Statesmen of our race have been among the 
governors of almost every nation under the 
sun. Our own land we have never governed 
yet. The names of Swift, of Goldsmith, of 
Sheridan, of a score of other men of letters add 
to the glory of the record of English literature, 
not of ours. Our people by their toil of mind 
and muscle have made other lands rich in 
[318] 



THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 

manufacture and commerce. Ireland remains 
poor. 

That is why there is not and cannot be a his- 
tory of Ireland. It is never in Ireland that 
our history has been made. The threads of our 
story are ours, spun at home, but they are 
woven into splendid fabrics elsewhere, not in 
Ireland. But the history of the Irish people 
will be a great work when it is written. There 
will be strange chapters in it, and none 
stranger than those which tell of our part in 
the making of America. It will be a record 
of mingled good and evil, but it will always 
have in it the elements of high romance. From 
the middle of the 18th century, when the tide 
of emigration set westward from Ulster, 
down to to-day when with slackening force it 
flows from Connaught, those who went have 
always been the men and women for whom life 
at home seemed hopeless. There was no prom- 
ise of good for them here. But in spite of the 
intolerable sadness of their going, in spite of 
the fact that at home they were beaten men, 
there was in them some capacity for doing 

[319] 



FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO 

things. We can succeed, it seems, elsewhere 
but not here. This is the strange law which 
has governed our history. We recognize its 
force everywhere for centuries back. America 
gives the latest example of its working. An 
Irishman returns from a visit to America won- 
dering, despairing, hoping. The wonder is in 
him because he knows those who went and has 
seen the manner of their going. Success for 
them seemed impossible, yet very often they 
have succeeded. The despair is in him because 
he knows that it has always been in other lands, 
not in their own that our people succeed, and 
because there is no power which can alter the 
decrees of destiny. But hope survives in him, 
flickering, because what our people can do else- 
where they can certainly do at home if only 
we can discover the solution of the malignant 
riddle of our failure. 



[320] 

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